Methane emissions of major economies in 2014: A household-consumption-based perspective

Abstract

With the expansion of economic globalization and the growth of international trade, the pulling effect of household consumption to global anthropogenic CH4 emissions related to production activities is becoming increasingly evident. This paper adopts a new perspective from the household-consumption side to investigate the CH4 emissions of major economies in 2014 and compares it with the scenario under the final-demand-based perspective by combing the world input-output database and the latest emission data from the UNFCCC and EDGAR v5.0 database. Budgets of CH4 emissions for 43 economies are established and trade connections & balances among major economies are explored. Results show that consumption-driven economies are allocated more CH4 emissions in the household-consumption-based accounting (HCBA) framework compared to the final-demand-based accounting (FDBA) framework. The total trade-related transfer of CH4 emissions is shown to sum up to 19% and 27% of the global total under the HCBA and FDBA frameworks, respectively. The household-consumption-based CH4 emissions of China, India, Indonesia and Mexico are much lower than their final-demand-based CH4 emissions, while the converse is true for the United States, Russia, Japan, the United Kingdom and Germany. The new accounting framework provides a new view to understand trade-related CH4 emissions of major economies and to identify the role of household consumption in global supply chains, offering important implications for greenhouse gas emission mitigation.