Abstract
Traditional consumption-based greenhouse gas emissions accounting attributed the gap between consumption-based and production-based emissions to international trade. Yet few attempts have analyzed the temporal deviation between current emissions and future consumption, which can be explained through changes in capital stock. Here we develop a dynamic model to incorporate capital stock change in consumption-based accounting. The new model is applied using global data for 1995–2009. Our results show that global emissions embodied in consumption determined by the new model are smaller than those obtained from the traditional model. The emissions embodied in global capital stock increased steadily during the period. However, capital plays very different roles in shaping consumption-based emissions for economies with different development characteristics. As a result, the dynamic model yields similar consumption-based emissions estimation for many developed countries comparing with the traditional model, but it highlights the dynamics of fast-developing countries.
Highlights
Traditional consumption-based greenhouse gas emissions accounting attributed the gap between consumption-based and production-based emissions to international trade
In addition to productionbased Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions accounting (PBA) that has provided a baseline for climate science and policy regimes[3,4,5], consumptionbased accounting (CBA) has attracted increased attention over the past decade[6,7,8,9,10]
In most traditional CBA studies, global GHG emissions of a given year are allocated to different countries according to their final demands and current emissions embodied in final demand of a country are used to indicate its consumption-based emissions[11,25,26,27,28,29]
Summary
Traditional consumption-based greenhouse gas emissions accounting attributed the gap between consumption-based and production-based emissions to international trade. The new model is applied to the global economy based on the World Input-Output Database[30] to examine the role of capital in consumption-based GHG emissions accounting.
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