Carbon footprint and voting preferences of a council

Abstract

Accounting for carbon should be undertaken at multiple scales to create awareness of the negative environmental impacts of consumption. We undertake a comprehensive consumption-based supply-chain assessment of a community's emissions for a selected council area in the Greater Sydney region of Australia using multi-regional input-output analysis, by constructing a customised input-output table with data from the Australian Household Expenditure Survey on items related to food, beverages, housing, transport, energy, clothing & footwear, household appliances & furniture, medical services, communication, recreation and education. We quantify the Scope-1, -2, and -3 emissions of households in the council area, and put the results in the context of voting preferences of the Council community. Our results suggest that despite left-wing voter preferences, the consumption habits of green voters carry high carbon footprints – the per-capita carbon footprint of Inner West residents is about 1.3 times more than the footprint of residents in the Rest of Greater Sydney. Furthermore, about two-thirds of the footprint is embodied in upstream supply chains for satisfying consumption. This result is significant in that it means that if policy addressed only energy-related direct emissions, it would be missing a majority of the population's CO2e footprint.