EIPOT Final Project Report - Stockholm Environment Institute

ERA-NET SKEP Project EIPOT (www.eipot.eu)
“Development of a methodology for the assessment of global environmental impacts of traded goods and services”
2.3 Spatial dimension
The third dimension is geography, which considers the spatial aspect of trade and the distribution of its
impacts. Naturally, any method that aims to quantify and assess the impacts of international trade
needs to be able to distinguish countries or regions of origin and destination as well as their economic
structure and production technologies and efficiencies. The geographical scope and the number of
countries and sectors considered is therefore an important factor in the evaluation of EIPOT methods.
Furthermore, the method should be able to assess environmental pressures that cannot be allocated
directly to countries, such as emissions of international transport by water and air.
Although the original focus of the EIPOT project was to build a method for SKEP countries, we aim at
formulating a more general framework that is in principle applicable to any country or region. One
example is the Mediterranean region where a list of actions has been proposed for applying the
consumption-based approach to GHG emissions (CP/RAC 2008). Ultimately, the feasibility of
implementing a method in or for a particular country will depend on data availability. This issue is
discussed in Chapter 5.
2.4 Temporal dimension
Time is the fourth dimension that needs to be considered. Temporal issues determine policy questions
and in turn the choice of methodology or model that is able to address these questions. 9 The methods
shown in Figure 2.1 are all ex-post approaches that use data from the past to enumerate previous
environmental impacts. Often the results are used as an approximation for present time impacts of
production or consumption. This is sufficient to establish the current hotspots of pressures or impacts
and to devise environmental or SCP policies that address current production and consumption
patterns. However, if the goal is to anticipate future impacts or test the effect of specific policies (such
as taxation, trade tariffs, carbon trading, government spending), scenario or dynamic modelling or a
combination of both needs to be employed. To cover this policy field, econometric and dynamic
models with explicit coverage of international trade were included in the RACER analysis of the EIPOT
project (Lutter et al. 2008).
2.5 Life cycles
The fifth dimension concerns another system boundary aspect, namely the life cycle stages of traded
goods. When performing a life cycle assessment of a product, upstream production impacts during the
cradle-to-gate or cradle-to-shelf phase need to be included as well as downstream impacts during the
use and disposal phase (cradle-to-grave). When comparing products, impacts in all life cycle stages
should be considered. The lifetime of a product becomes important in its use phase and methods
need to attribute impacts accordingly. With regard to trade, the use phase and/or disposal phase may
be (partly) abroad, such as tourist trips or the export of waste to developing countries.
At the macro and meso levels, there should be consistency between the stages. Where materials are
recycled in the disposal stage and re-enter the production chain, this should be accounted for in the
use of primary and secondary materials in the material stage.
9
Compare to the categorisation of tools for sustainability assessment by Ness et al. (2007).
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