The Energy Climate Water Nexus: A Global Sustainability Impact Assessment of U.S. Manufacturing

Abstract

This study assesses the global economic and environmental impacts of United States manufacturing industries over a 20-year period, covering the areas of economics, climate change, and water and energy use. It covers 35 industries located in 40 major economies and the Rest of the World (ROW) from 1995 to 2014. To measure the global sustainability impacts generated by the activity of U.S. manufacturing industries, a multi-region input-output (MRIO) modeling approach is proposed, and twenty MRIO models were built to conduct a time-series analysis. The findings indicate that economic impacts increased both domestically and globally, except in the year 2008, and that the intensity of environmental impacts decreased substantially, while cumulative environmental impacts exhibited a non-decreasing trend. The three categories under investigation were found to be strongly linked, which calls for further policy developments by engineering managers, who should take into account all of the categories together, rather than singly.