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”
EXIOPOL data
To enable the estimation of environmental impacts and external costs of different economic sector
activities, final consumption activities and resource consumption for countries in the EU, EXIOPOL is
setting up a multi-regional input-output framework where environmental interventions are taken
account of via satellite accounts – so-called environmental extensions. These extensions – in total
around 130 – comprise material input, area and water usage, energy input and emissions.
The compilation of material input data in EXIOPOL followed the nomenclature and categorisation of
materials listed in the handbook for economy-wide material flow accounting published by the
Statistical Office of the European Union (Weisz et al. 2007). The material section encompasses the
aggregated material categories ‘fossil fuels’, ‘metals’, ‘construction and industrial minerals’, and
‘biomass’; within these categories, materials are divided into sub-categories. For all these categories,
extension data in EXIOPOL include used and unused extraction.
Land area was included in the EXIOPOL database for the area used to generate biomass for
economic processing using the categories ‘arable land’, ‘pasture’, and ‘forest’.
With respect to water use, the database focuses on water consumption in the agricultural sector, by
far the biggest water consumer. The main data source for the EXIOPOL database was the study
Water Footprints of Nations by UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education (Chapagain and Hoekstra
2004), based widely on the FAO-AQUASTAT database where water use data are given in yearly
averages for five-year periods. Additionally, data from the LPJmL model (Rost et al. 2008) were used,
to disaggregate blue (water retrieved from rivers, lakes and so on used for irrigation purposes) and
green (precipitation) water consumption.
To set up the energy extensions for EXIOPOL, the accounting principles as published by International
Energy Agency (IEA)/OECD and Eurostat (OECD et al. 2004) were used. The main source of energy
input data were IEA energy balances (IEA 2007a, b). IEA records the supply and use of around 60
energy commodities which then had to be transferred into the SUT-format of EXIOPOL. For this
process, LCA factors were used to get more detailed information on energy consumption by specific
production processes.
Emissions related to certain economic activities were calculated using energy use as auxiliary data.
Values of energy use in certain sectors (‘activity data’) were multiplied with emission coefficients taken
from international guidelines such as UNFCCC (IPCC 2006) or EMEP/CORINAIR (EEA 2007). This
resulted in around 40 environmental extension vectors including air pollutants such as GHGs, metals,
and others.
Global datasets
Energy use and CO 2 emissions from fossil fuel use for 140 countries are available from a database
provided by the International Energy Agency (IEA 2008). The data is consistent with the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sectoral approach (see IEA, 2006: chapter 5) and thus
does not include emissions from international marine bunkers and international aviation. The IEA data
distinguish only 18 sectors. This means that for some important industries CO 2 intensities cannot be
distinguished, a relatively far-reaching limitation if trade volumes for these sectors are high. A detailed
sector analysis in the course of the UK-MRIO project (Wiedmann et al. 2008b) showed, for example,
that using the same average carbon intensity for the sectors 'electricity supply', 'gas supply' and 'water
collection and supply' is completely inadequate. Therefore other data sources, such as EDGAR or
GTAP, must be used to further disaggregate sectoral emissions (see Wilting and Vringer 2007).
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