Carbon, water and land use accounting: Consumption vs production perspectives

Yousaf Ali

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 2017, vol. 67, issue C, 921-934

Abstract: The traditional approach of accounting of environmental pressure in the Kyoto Protocols follows the production-based accounting, which attributes all environmental pressures generated from production activities within a country boundary to that country total environmental pressure. However, the major flaws of this approach is that it does not take into account the environmental pressures embodied in imports and so build stimulus for shifting of environmental pressures abroad. An alternative approach to include environmental pressures associated with imports to the country and subtract export related environmental pressures is the consumption-based approach or footprint approach. This approach has been widely considered as an alternative way to more adequately allot responsibilities between the emitters and final consumers. This study compares and discusses the concepts of both approaches, showing the results of an empirical analysis and going into the application of the two different perspectives in worldwide environmental policies. This paper presents the results of an analysis of the Carbon, water and land footprints of the worldwide from 1995 to 2009, and compares the outcomes for the two approaches for four world regions (i.e. EU, OECD, BRIC and RoW). The analysis is based on a multi-region input output (MRIO) model to assess these environmental pressures. The proposed model uses the world-input-output-database (WIOD) covering 35 sectors and 41 countries. The results show that during the entire study period, the carbon emissions, land use and water use for the EU and OECD regions are higher in the consumer approach than in the producer approach. The results further indicate that, for the BRIC and rest of the world (RoW) regions, the carbon emission, land and water use are higher in the producer approach than in the consumer approach.

Keywords: Carbon footprint; Water footprint; Land footprint; Environmental accounting; Consumption versus production accounts; MRIO; WIOD (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032116305093
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:rensus:v:67:y:2017:i:c:p:921-934

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/600126/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 600126/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.rser.2016.09.022

Access Statistics for this article

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews is currently edited by L. Kazmerski

More articles in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().