Abstract
PurposeTrade is increasingly considered a significant contributor to environmental impacts. The assessment of the impacts of trade is usually performed via environmentally extended input–output analysis (EEIOA). However, process-based life cycle assessment (LCA) applied to traded goods allows increasing the granularity of the analysis and may be essential to unveil specific impacts due to traded products.MethodsThis study assesses the environmental impacts of the European trade, considering two modelling approaches: respectively EEIOA, using EXIOBASE 3 as supporting database, and process-based LCA. The interpretation of the results is pivotal to improve the robustness of the assessment and the identification of hotspots. The hotspot identification focuses on temporal trends and on the contribution of products and substances to the overall impacts. The inventories of elementary flows associated with EU trade, for the period 2000–2010, have been characterized considering 14 impact categories according to the Environmental Footprint (EF2017) Life Cycle Impact Assessment method.Results and discussionThe two modelling approaches converge in highlighting that in the period 2000–2010: (i) EU was a net importer of environmental impacts; (ii) impacts of EU trade and EU trade balance (impacts of imports minus impacts of exports) were increasing over time, regarding most impact categories under study; and (iii) similar manufactured products were the main contributors to the impacts of exports from EU, regarding most impact categories. However, some results are discrepant: (i) larger impacts are obtained from IO analysis than from process-based LCA, regarding most impact categories, (ii) a different set of most contributing products is identified by the two approaches in the case of imports, and (iii) large differences in the contributions of substances are observed regarding resource use, toxicity, and ecotoxicity indicators.ConclusionsThe interpretation step is crucial to unveil the main hotspots, encompassing a comparison of the differences between the two methodologies, the assumptions, the data coverage and sources, the completeness of inventory as basis for impact assessment. The main driver for the observed divergences is identified to be the differences in the impact intensities of goods, both induced by inherent properties of the IO and life cycle inventory databases and by some of this study’s modelling choices. The combination of IO analysis and process-based LCA in a hybrid framework, as performed in other studies but generally not at the macro-scale of the full trade of a country or region, appears a potential important perspective to refine such an assessment in the future.
Highlights
The production and consumption of goods and services is responsible for global resource use and associated environmental impacts
This study aims at assessing the environmental impacts of European Union (EU) trade, with a specific focus on trends and on the contribution of products and specific emissions and resource used
The total environmental impacts induced by EU trade are firstly compared considering the period 2000–2010 (Sects. 3.1 and 3.2), discussing the common patterns and on the contrary the discrepancies in results from the two modelling approaches
Summary
The production and consumption of goods and services is responsible for global resource use and associated environmental impacts. From 1961 to 2017, world final consumption expenditures of households and non-profit institutions serving households have continuously increased (except in 2009), with annual growth rates ranging from 1.3 to 6.1% (World Bank 2018) In this context, the pressures exerted on the environment, and on the impacts these pressures induce, have been studied both in a producer and in a consumer perspective. According to the producer perspective, any sector/ country emitting a substance or extracting a resource is considered responsible for this emission/extraction (often called domestic or territorial emission/extraction), whereas from the consumer perspective, the final consumer is considered responsible for the supply chain emissions and resource extractions Such a shift in the perspective on the assessment of environmental impacts has opened the door to a growing attention to the burdens associated with trade. The influence of international trade has been studied considering greenhouse gas emissions and material use (Wiedmann et al 2015), land use (Weinzettel et al 2013), nitrogen oxides (NOx), sulfur dioxide (SO2) and ozone depleting substances (Kanemoto et al 2014), eutrophication (Hamilton et al 2018), biodiversity (Lenzen et al 2012), or a set of these indicators (Steen-Olsen et al 2012; Wood et al 2018)
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