Greenhouse Gas Emissions in New Zealand: A Preliminary Consumption-Based Analysis

Carl Romanos (), Suzi Kerr and Campbell Will ()
Additional contact information
Carl Romanos: Stanford University
Campbell Will: University of Otago

No 14_05, Working Papers from Motu Economic and Public Policy Research

Abstract: New Zealand’s per capita greenhouse gas emissions are usually calculated by taking total emissions as reported under the Kyoto Protocol or the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and simply dividing by population. However this focuses on emissions associated with production within New Zealand. From the point of view of individuals, these are not the emissions they control, and hence can mitigate. Individuals can calculate their “carbon footprint” but tools to do this typically focus on a few categories of emissions (mostly electricity, direct fuel use and waste) and emissions footprints are not available for a wide range of households so cannot be used for comparative analysis. This paper explores how the carbon emissions related to the consumption categories of households in New Zealand vary with household characteristics. We use product consumption data from the 2007 Household Economic Survey. Consumption within each category is linked to a carbon intensity multiplier (tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per dollar of consumption) which is derived from: the official 2007 input–output table of 106 industries produced by Statistics New Zealand; energy data on carbon dioxide per petajoule of fuel in each industry from the Energy Data File; and the Energy Greenhouse Gas Emissions Report both provided by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment. Previous literature has used similar methods to calculate the incidence of a carbon tax (e.g. Creedy and Sleeman [2006]). This paper uses these methods in order to study which sectors of household expenditure offer the greatest opportunities for mitigation and how these opportunities vary with household characteristics such as income decile, region and household composition.

Keywords: Climate change; emissions; consumption; household emissions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 D62 Q01 Q41 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2014-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene and nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://motu-www.motu.org.nz/wpapers/14_05.pdf

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:mtu:wpaper:14_05

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Motu Economic and Public Policy Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Maxine Watene ().