Full Paper - ESEE 2011 - Advancing Ecological Economics

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a higher degree of warming, for example a 4 degree level of warming. This project explores these two possibilities – effective mitigation and a stabilisation at 2 degrees of warming or if this does not happen; an increased adaptation requirement to a 4 degree warming scenario. The cumulative emissions that could lead to these global warming effects have been estimated through the use of various climate models (Meinhausen et al 2009; Committee on Climate Change (2008)). By understanding the total cumulative emissions that can be released globally over time, emission reduction pathways can be developed to indicate the rate of emission reductions required to meet this target (Anderson and Bows, <strong>2011</strong>). Global emission reduction pathways split between Annex B and Non-Annex B countries have been produced on a consumption based emissions allocation principle by Bows and Barrett (2010). Both Bows and Barrett (2010) and Anderson and Bows (<strong>2011</strong>) use a total cumulative emission budget of between 1321 – 1578 GtCO2e for the period 2000 – 2100. Dividing the global emissions budget between nations does raise many questions related to the equity of burden sharing. Investigating the equity debate is not the principal objective of this work, but understanding the impacts of a nation from both a territorial and a consumption based approach may help to contribute further evidence to this discussion. As Minx et al. (2009a) acknowledge, consumption based approaches are a useful perspective for any frameworks that attribute individual responsibility (or right) to a share of GHG emissions released from the goods and services that they consume. It also challenges the restriction on countries to limit production based emissions if they have a large exporting sector, where goods are produced for consumption by other nations (JC Minx et al. 2009). A scenario approach This paper presents the work to quantify the territorial and consumption based emissions associated with a number of different future scenarios. The purpose of the paper is to explain the quantification method for those scenarios as opposed to the scenario approach itself, however a short contextual background is provided in the next paragraph. Scenarios have been used in a number of fields to enable individuals and organisations to visualise future systems and assess the implications of those futures on decisions made today (IAF & IoIR, 2004). Their use originates in industry where they were used to facilitate strategic decision making. The use of scenario planning and analysis has since been applied in a wide range of fields by policy makers, consultants and academics. In the context of emissions reductions intangible long-term emissions targets and budgets can make short-term decision making difficult. Scenarios can therefore be useful to describe the process of change required to achieve budgets and targets and facilitate longer-term planning. Background to the modelling approaches The modelling framework has been created to enable the quantification of UK territorial and consumption based emissions under the scenarios formulated by the wider project, and then assess these emissions scenarios against the cumulative emissions pathways described above. The basis for the calculation of UK territorial and consumption based emissions accounts is an environmentally extended multi-regional input-output model. 4
The Multi-Regional Input-Output Model Input-output analysis (IOA) as an economic modelling technique aims to understand the interactions between economic sectors, producers and consumers. Principally formulated by Wassily Leontief in the 1930s, economic input-output analysis has been used ever since in countless applications addressing questions on economy, labour, social issues, trade, energy, ecology, resource use, industrial ecology and environmental science. The compilation of input-output tables of national and regional economies is now a routine practice governed by a UN standard (CenSa, 2010). Within the input-output models rows represent product groups and the columns represent the industry, government, or household sectors which consume them. The transactions that take place between the sectors are most frequently described in monetary values (as a result of the original principally economic function that the models performed) see Appendix A for a brief description of the basic IO framework and Miller and Blair (2009) or Leontief (1970) for a full breakdown. There are some examples with physical units or energy, but these are often restricted by data availability (for example, Klaus Hubacek and Giljum 2003). The basic structure of an environmentally extended IO model is shown in Figure 2. Industries 1 . . . n 1 k 1 Industries . . . n Intermediate flows between industries (n x n) Value added (k x n) Total input Environmental Extension (r) Figure 2: General structure of an input-output table 1 . . . l Final demand categories Legend (n x l) An environmentally extended IO table is formed when an input-output model is extended to include environmental data ((r) in Figure 2) and this has been recognised as a useful top-down method for re-allocating emissions from production to end use. A further extension to the basic framework is the addition of trade data and foreign emissions intensities. This process moves the model from single region assumption, where imported goods and services are assumed to be produced with the same emissions intensity as the equivalent domestic sector, to a multi-region model where varying emissions intensities are applied according to the country of production. Total output n – no. of industries k – no. of value added categories l – no. of final demand categories r – no. of carbon emissions 5
Page 1 and 2: Paper prepared for the 9th conferen
Page 3 and 4: Abstract The official way of accoun
Page 5: Figure 1 UK GHG Emissions, 1992 to
Page 9 and 10: of this work. The resulting underly
Page 11 and 12: Bottom-up Top-down Simulation Simul
Page 13 and 14: E = energy use ES = energy service
Page 15 and 16: Changes to the direct emissions imp
Page 17 and 18: might lead to errors in the assignm
Page 19 and 20: References Agnolucci, P., Ekins, P.
Page 21 and 22: Office of National Statistics (2010
Page 23 and 24: Appendix A The standard generalised
Page 25 and 26: 50 atp Air transport 51 cmn Communi

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