Growth in Environmental Footprints and Environmental Impacts Embodied in Trade: Resource Efficiency Indicators from EXIOBASE3

By Richard Wood, Konstantin Stadler, Moana S. Simas, T. Bulavskaya, S. Giljum, S. Lutter, Arnold Tukker. 2018

196 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Most countries show a relative decoupling of economic growth from domestic resource use, implying increased resource efficiency. However, international trade facilitates the exchange of products between regions with disparate resource productivity. Hence, for an understanding of resource efficiency from a consumption perspective that takes into account the impacts in the upstream supply chains, there is a need to assess the environmental pressures embodied in trade. We use EXIOBASE3, a new multiregional input‐output database, to examine the rate of increase in resource efficiency, and investigate the ways in which international trade contributes to the displacement of pressures on the environment from the consumption of a population. We look at the environmental pressures of energy use, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, material use, water use, and land use. Material use stands out as the only indicator growing in both absolute and relative terms to population and gross domestic product (GDP), while land use is the only indicator showing absolute decoupling from both references. Energy, GHG, and water use show relative decoupling. As a percentage of total global environmental pressure, we calculate the net impact displaced through trade rising from 23% to 32% for material use (1995–2011), 23% to 26% for water use, 20% to 29% for energy use, 20% to 26% for land use, and 19% to 24% for GHG emissions. The results show a substantial disparity between trade‐related impacts for Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and non‐OECD countries. At the product group level, we observe the most rapid growth in environmental footprints in clothing and footwear. The analysis points to implications for future policies aiming to achieve environmental targets, while fully considering potential displacement effects through international trade.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Environmental Engineering, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0a4c4c10d56aa921906ec79afa22f7befe93368b

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Citations in the corpus

EXIOBASE 3: Developing a Time Series of Detailed Environmentally Extended Multi‐Regional Input‐Output Tables (2018, unknown): “For further details, see the main text and supporting information S1 on the Web. of the database, see the connected paper in this special issue: Wood et al. 2018).”
Agricultural and forestry trade drives large share of tropical deforestation emissions (2019, background): “(2011); Davis and Caldeira (2010); 20–24%, with EXIOBASE country resolution (Wood et al., 2018)).”
A systematic review of the evidence on decoupling of GDP, resource use and GHG emissions, part II: synthesizing the insights (2020, background): “…territorial greenhouse gases with LULUCF in CO2eq (GHG PB) from (UNFCCC 2019) for 2008–2017; Total GHG footprint except LULUCF (GHG CB) & TPES footprint (TPES CB) & TFC footprint (TFC CB) from EXIOBASE 3 (Wood et al 2018) for 2003–2012; GDP (constant 2010 US$) from UN national accounts (UN 2019).”
Quantifying the potential for climate change mitigation of consumption options (2020, background): “3 tCO2eq/cap in 2011 [2]; however, these are highly unequally distributed across income groups and countries [3–8].”
The role of trade in the greenhouse gas footprints of EU diets (2018, background): “Developed OECD countries continue to displace environmental pressures onto non-OECD countries (Wood et al., 2018), which is observable when the accounting is based on consumption instead of the production perspective.”
A review of trends and drivers of greenhouse gas emissions by sector from 1990 to 2018 (2021, background): “Therefore, GHG emissions only show relative, not absolute, decoupling from GDP at the global level (Deutch 2017, Wood et al 2018).”