Decoupling or delusion? Measuring emissions displacement in foreign trade

By Magnus Jiborn, A. Kander, Viktoras Kulionis, Hana Nielsen, Daniel Moran. 2018

116 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract In a world where climate goals are global but action remains firmly in the hands of states, reliable methods are needed to ensure that emissions reductions on a national level are not offset by carbon leakage. Appropriate indicators are needed to help policy makers set accurate targets for the carbon balance of their foreign trade and monitor the development of trade in a meaningful way. This paper proposes a new displacement indicator – the technology adjusted balance of emissions embodied in trade – that improves on existing ideas by separating out the effects of scale and composition of trade from the effects of different technologies and energy systems. The new indicator is calculated for Swedish and UK trade from 1995 to 2009, a period when both countries have reported decreasing territorial emissions together with sustained economic growth. One key finding is that, for both countries, outsourcing of emissions is less serious than what conventional analysis of emissions embodied in trade suggests. For Sweden, the technology adjusted balance of emissions embodied in trade is positive throughout the studied period, implying that its exports reduce emissions abroad more than what is generated by its imports. However, we also find that both countries have changed the composition of their imports and exports during this period: imports have become more carbon intensive and, exports less so, compared to the world economy at large.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Environmental Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d57e9d5d449c71167666956980bf5e24866ac173

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Citations in the corpus

Global patterns of ecologically unequal exchange: Implications for sustainability in the 21st century (2021, background): “…to poorer regions and ecological distribution conflicts (Martinez-Alier et al., 2010; Warlenius et al., 2015), and the out-sourcing of resource-intensive production rather than curbing resource use in the high-income nations (Jiborn et al., 2018; Schandl et al., 2018; Wiedmann et al., 2015).”
A systematic review of the evidence on decoupling of GDP, resource use and GHG emissions, part II: synthesizing the insights (2020, methodology): “Recognition of this challenge has resulted in proposals of various methods to derive displacement indicators (Kander et al 2015, Jiborn et al 2018).”
Imbalance and drivers of carbon emissions embodied in trade along the Belt and Road Initiative (2020, background): “As a result, this country still contributes to global emissions reduction by exporting more products via international trade, and should not be criticized for its higher national emissions [17].”