Full Paper - ESEE 2011 - Advancing Ecological Economics

Abstract
The official way of accounting for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is established under the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The UK is party to the UNFCCC
agreement, but while the UNFCCC system generally takes into account all greenhouse gas emissions
from UK territory, it fails to account for emissions embedded in UK imports consumed in the UK.
When comparing the two ways of emissions accounting it has been found that over recent years as
UK territorial emissions have reducing, consumer emissions continue to increase (T Wiedmann et al.
2010b). This paper outlines the use of an environmentally extended multi-regional input output
model (EEMRIO) to examine the implications of UK climate change strategies on the UK's consumer
emissions. It presents the methods used to extend and soft-link the EEMRIO with external data in
order to address three key research questions: firstly what impact do territorial mitigation pathways
have on the UK's consumption based emissions; secondly how can changes in consumption levels
and profiles contribute to mitigation; and thirdly how much carbon leaks out of mitigation efforts
due to imports from countries that operate outside the UNFCCC (defined here as non-Annex B
countries)?
Introduction
This paper is set in the context of global climate change and the necessity to reduce GHG emissions
to a level where there is a minimised risk of dangerous climate change. The wider project from
which this paper is derived will develop a number of climate change mitigation and adaptation
scenarios for the UK consistent with 2 and 4 degree global warming and explore how these vary
under territorial and consumption based approaches to emissions accounting. This paper explains
how a number of tools and techniques have been adapted and soft-linked in order to quantify the
scenarios as robustly as possible, within the boundaries and constraints of the data and the models
themselves.
To set the boundaries and emissions objectives for the scenarios cumulative emissions budgets have
been calculated and the scenarios will be used to explore how different technological, economic and
policy futures will contribute to the progress to meet those targets. The modelling framework has
been set up so that it is possible to quantify these different elements of the scenario and consider
them from the consumption perspective. This will add an additional perspective to the territorial
accounting that takes places under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
(UNFCCC) as it can explore the possibility of carbon leakage from countries with binding emission
reduction targets to those without under each scenario.
The basis for the calculation of UK territorial and consumption based emissions accounts is an
environmentally extended multi-regional input-output model. This type of modelling is useful for
considering emissions from a consumption perspective, but it does have a number of limitations
such as; a lack of product detail, a static economic structure, limited industrial energy demand data
and limited scope for analysis the balance of energy use across different sectors of the economy. The
paper therefore presents a method for combining a basic EEMRIO model with additional scenario
tools and more detailed data in an effort to overcome some of these limitations.
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