Integrated Economic and Physical Information for Environmental Footprint Modelling

Whether inspired by motives of fair attribution of environmental responsibilities or the search for the most effective scheme for market driven emission abatements, reliable analyses of the environmental consequences of consumption is sought after by policymakers, researchers and the environmentally concerned citizen alike. A solid framework for such analyses exists in the form of input-output analysis, though such analyses have not been as widespread as their potential usefulness and pertinence might suggest. Following the ascent of environmental issues as a central item on the agenda even in top-level international policy negotiations, and facilitated by advances in modeling and computational capabilities, recent years have seen an increased focus on the development and application of comprehensive global input-output models for environmental assessments. The work presented here is an attempt to capitalize on the present suite of available global input-output databases to assess environmental pressures embodied in consumed goods and services, commonly referred to as environmental footprints of consumption, and discuss the reliability of the databases through a comparative assessment. By extending the economic input-output models with environmental data, environmental flows, either directly or virtually embodied in products, can be tracked through the economy as it is modeled in the input-output system. In my PhD work, presented herein in the form of four resulting scientific papers, I have contributed to extending and adapting a global model with supplementary data to allow improved analyses of environmental pressures embodied in traded and consumed products, and to assessing a group of global models. For a large-scale assessment of global flows of embodied land and water use, we combined data from the comprehensive FAO database on worldwide production and trade of agricultural and forestry products with a global multiregional inputoutput model. The more detailed representation of these products types, which are the ones that mostly contribute toward land and water use embodied in consumption, allowed increased accuracy in the modeling of these footprint types. Using this improved model to assess carbon, land and water footprints for each of the EU member states, we found EU average footprints per capita of 13.3 tons of CO2 equivalents, 2.53 hectares of world-average bioproductive land, and 179 m3 of consumed surface and ground freshwater for 2004. A fur