Greenhouse gas emissions in British Columbia: Production versus consumption accounting from 2010 to 2015

Abstract

As a result of carbon-pricing policies, a number of jurisdictions across the world claim to be decoupling their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from their gross domestic product (GDP). In British Columbia (BC), Canada, in what appears to be decoupling from 2007 to 2018, GHGs with respect to GDP declined by 16% ( BC Government 2020 ). This finding, however, is the result of a production-based method of accounting—the predominant global approach for allocating emissions—and not a consumption-based method. In this study, we compare these two accounting methods with respect to British Columbian decoupling. We calculate consumption-based emissions through a multi-regional input-output analysis from 2010 to 2015. In our results for 2015, we find total consumption emissions of 82.5Mt of CO 2 e; when compared to the total production emissions of 73.7Mt of CO 2 e, we find BC to be a net consumer of emissions by 8.8Mt of CO 2 e for 2015. Although BC has had this net consumer status since at least 2004 ( Dobson and Fellows, 2017 ), this orientation is in decline primarily due to the decarbonizing trends of China and the USA. In short, for BC from 2010–2015, on a per capita basis, both production and consumption accounts of emissions declined (even as GDP rose), but per capita consumption accounts declined more than production accounts and mostly due to emissions reductions from trade partners. Finally, this study may be of interest to policymakers and scientists, and like other scholars, we recommend that consumption-based inventories accompany production-based accounts when designing and assessing global GHG mitigation policy.