Environmental and social footprints of international trade

By T. Wiedmann, Manfred Lenzen. Nature Geoscience, 2018

840 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Globalization has led to an increasing geospatial separation of production and consumption, and, as a consequence, to an unprecedented displacement of environmental and social impacts through international trade. A large proportion of total global impacts can be associated with trade, and the trend is rising. Advances in global multi-region input-output models have allowed researchers to draw detailed, international supply-chain connections between harmful production in social and environmental hotspots and affluent consumption in global centres of wealth. The general direction of impact displacement is from developed to developing countries—an increase of health impacts in China from air pollution linked to export production for the United States being one prominent example. The relocation of production across countries counteracts national mitigation policies and may negate ostensible achievements in decoupling impacts from economic growth. A comprehensive implementation of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals therefore requires the inclusion of footprint indicators to avoid loopholes in national sustainability assessments.Indicators of environmental and social footprints of international trade must inform assessments of progress towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals, suggests a synthesis of studies on the geospatial separation of consumption and production.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Environmental Engineering, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5e6524492039d5b3e5ef5f7e83c10a99b8e7e189

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Citations in the corpus

A systematic review of the evidence on decoupling of GDP, resource use and GHG emissions, part I: bibliometric and conceptual mapping (2020, background): “Furthermore, to understand decoupling, a differentiation between “production-based” and ‘consumption-based’ approaches is indispensable, as it takes the increasing role of global trade into account (Peters 2008, Peters et al 2012, Steininger et al 2015, Wiedmann and Lenzen 2018, Haberl et al 2019).”
Imbalance and drivers of carbon emissions embodied in trade along the Belt and Road Initiative (2020, background): “The world has undergone unprecedented environmental change as a result of increasing international trade with profound implications for sustainable development [1,2].”
Entropy-based Chinese city-level MRIO table framework (2021, background): “…decade, this has mostly been at the country level (Dietzenbacher, Lenzen, et al., 2013; Haeger, 1975; Lenzen et al., 2012, 2013; Tukker et al., 2013; Wiedmann & Lenzen, 2018) or the subnational level, such as provinces, states or counties (Huang et al., 2021; Mi et al., 2017; Zheng et al., 2020).”
Unwelcome exchange: International trade as a direct and indirect driver of biological invasions worldwide (2021, background): “pacts from developed to developing countries, particularly in relation to the production of greenhouse gases and other pollutants that harm human health.(79) A first step might be to make the most of the continuing growth in regional trade agreements worldwide (Figure 2) to establish stronger regula”
Global patterns of ecologically unequal exchange: Implications for sustainability in the 21st century (2021, methodology): “And while unequal exchange enables biophysical and economic growth in the benefitting regions, it entails continued inequalities between countries and shifting of environmental burdens to extractive regions (Wiedmann and Lenzen, 2018).”
Global virtual water trade and the hydrological cycle: patterns, drivers, and socio-environmental impacts (2019, background): “…with CO2 emissions (Deng et al 2016b, Vora et al 2017,Meng et al 2018), however, the study of environmental and social footprints of international trade (Wiedmann and Lenzen 2018) and associated spillovers (Liu et al 2015) has often failed to explicitly account for the impacts on water resources.”
A systematic review of the evidence on decoupling of GDP, resource use and GHG emissions, part II: synthesizing the insights (2020, background): “which allow allocating extracted primary resources to final demand of any economy (Inomata 654 and Owen, 2014; Wiedmann and Lenzen, 2018).”