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”
1 Introduction
1.1 Background
The environmental consequences of intensifying international trade have gained importance in
European Union (EU) and worldwide policies in the past few years. This is emphasised, for example,
in the revised EU Sustainable Development Strategy, the Thematic Strategy on the Sustainable Use
of Natural Resources and in the EU Action Plan on Sustainable Consumption and Production (see
Nash 2009).
Products are increasingly produced in one part of the world, taken to another country and then
redistributed to their final country of consumption. To promote sustainable consumption and
production, there is a need to capture the whole life cycle impacts of products and services (in terms
of emissions, water use, material flows and so on), to fully quantify the environmental effects of
consumption and trade. However, there is no one accepted approach to assessing the transnational
impacts of consumption. Many existing methodologies such as life cycle analysis (LCA), resource flow
and material flow analysis (MFA) rely on average or outdated data and do not easily allow assessment
of the full impacts of production and consumption or infrastructure associated with production, use and
disposal. This is especially important when assessing products and services whose productionconsumption
chains span several national boundaries.
The SKEP ERA-NET (Scientific Knowledge for Environmental Protection) is a partnership of ministries
and agencies from 13 European countries, which funds environmental research. 1 The SKEP network
aims to promote good practice in developing science to effectively serve the needs of policy makers
and support evidence-led modern regulation. In 2008, SKEP commissioned research to develop a
methodology to assess transnational environmental impacts through international trade and the
EIPOT project (environmental impacts of trade) 2 was established. 3 . EIPOT brings together existing
knowledge and ongoing research to assess global environmental impacts of traded goods and
services. Its purpose is to review past and current accounting methodologies and to identify and
specify an integrated approach, which can be applied by SKEP member states and other countries.
The project was carried out between April 2008 and May 2009 by a consortium of four European
research institutions: Stockholm Environment Institute at the University of York (project coordinator),
Sustainable Europe Research Institute in Vienna, Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency in
Bilthoven and Statistics Sweden in Stockholm. As a quality assurance measure, the research was
reviewed throughout the project by three external experts, a SKEP Technical Group of six specialists
and the SKEP Call Steering Committee. Further information is provided on the EIPOT project website
www.eipot.eu.
1.2 Project scope and goal
The main aim of the EIPOT project was to specify an environmental accounting method to quantify
and assess the transnational environmental impacts of traded goods and services.
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http://www.skep-era.net.
We also use the acronym 'EIPOT' as a more general abbreviation for 'environmental impacts of trade'.
A second project, called IMEA (Import Environmental Accounting; http://www.imea-eu.org), was funded
under the same SKEP Research Call.
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