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”
technology assumptions made in symmetric tables are of superior quality and the trade-off between
SUTs and SIOTs needs to be decided on a case-by-case basis.
• Non-survey based balancing procedures should be used to re-balance hybridised IO tables, update
matrices and produce time series if no superior original data are available.
• Bilateral trade data are essential to estimate trade flows between the economic sectors of different
countries (off-diagonal trade flow matrices). We recommend using the UN Comtrade and
associated databases 43 in the first instance for consistency and world coverage.
• EXIOPOL will use process and LCA data to disaggregate environmentally relevant sectors further,
such as agriculture and food products, metal ores and products, fossil fuels, electricity and waste
treatment. If further specification is required, additional life cycle inventory data should be used, for
example from the European or International Reference Life Cycle Databases (ELCD, ILCD).
6 General Recommendations
Recommendations on methodology and data are made in Chapters 4 and 5, respectively. This chapter
looks at possible implementation of the methodology on a wider scale and discusses the role of
institutions in such a process. Future research needs and policy applications are also discussed here.
6.1 Further development of methods and tools for decision-making
There is a clear link between the (real or perceived) importance and urgency of problems, the societal,
political and economic driving forces and the sophistication of analytical methods and tools used to
address these problems. Economic growth has been the paradigm of modern times and consequently
economic analyses and indicators. While economic growth still seems to be the aim, a shift is
occurring towards the decoupling of economic growth from the use of natural resources; as we are
beginning to understand that the current growth in worldwide resource consumption cannot be
sustained indefinitely without risking the global ecological, social, and economic equilibrium.
As outlined in Chapter 1.4 (Policy Context), many facets of political and corporate decision-making
from the macro to the micro scale require suitable models. As widespread as the range of policy and
research questions might be, several common elements will boost the need for further development of
existing approaches:
• Increasing environmental pressures: global warming, land and soil degradation, acidification of
oceans, pollution of fresh and ocean water, loss of natural habitat are but some of the continuing
environmental and ecological problems worldwide (UNEP 2007).
• Increasing globalisation and international trade: despite the global economic crisis of 2008/09 there
is little doubt that the trend of increased specialisation in production, internationalisation of
corporations and trade across all sectors will continue.
• Europe and other industrialised countries, as well as emerging economies such as China or India,
are increasingly dependent on resources not available in their own territory. Consequently, these
countries import increasing amounts of resources from resource-rich countries with manifold
consequences. The dependency of these countries on exporting countries and the environmental,
social and economic consequences the exploitation has in situ, are at least partly the responsibility
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In particular BACI (http://www.cepii.fr/anglaisgraph/bdd/baci.htm) and NBER (http://www.nber.org/data).
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