Which countries and regions are the biggest net importers and exporters of CO₂ emissions embodied in trade? How much CO₂ has been shifted between different regions through international trade? What are the implications of considering consumer responsibility for global climate and trade policies? Martin Bruckner, Christine Polzin and Stefan Giljum have addressed these questions in a new paper entitled “Counting CO₂ emissions in a globalised world: Producer versus consumer-oriented methods for CO₂ accounting”.

The paper, which is the final outcome of the project Global responsibility for CO₂ emissions, commissioned by the German Development Institute (DIE) in Bonn, can be downloaded here.

Which countries and regions are the biggest net importers and exporters of CO₂ emissions embodied in trade? How much CO₂ has been shifted between different regions through international trade? What are the implications of considering consumer responsibility for global climate and trade policies? Martin Bruckner, Christine Polzin and Stefan Giljum have addressed these questions in a new paper entitled “Counting CO₂ emissions in a globalised world: Producer versus consumer-oriented methods for CO₂ accounting”.

The paper, which is the final outcome of the project Global responsibility for CO₂ emissions, commissioned by the German Development Institute (DIE) in Bonn, can be downloaded here.

In 2010, it has taken humanity less than nine months to exhaust its available ecological budget for the year, according to data from Global Footprint Network, in which SERI is one of the partner organisations.

Global Footprint Network calculates nature’s supply in the form of biocapacity, the amount of resources the planet regenerates each year, and compares that to human demand: the amount it takes to produce all the living resources we consume and absorb our carbon dioxide emissions, the so-called “Ecological Footprint”. Its data reveal that, as of August 21, humanity will have demanded all the ecological services – from filtering CO₂ to producing the raw materials for food – that nature can provide this year.

From now until the end of the year, we will meet our ecological demand by depleting resource stocks and accumulating greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

“If you spent your entire annual income in nine months, you would probably be extremely concerned,” said Global Footprint Network President Mathis Wackernagel. “The situation is no less dire when it comes to our ecological budget. Climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, water and food shortages — these are all clear signs that we can no longer finance our consumption on credit. Nature is foreclosing.”

Learn more about the Earth Overshoot Day 2010: www.footprintnetwork.org
SERI is also member of the Austrian Footprint Platform: www.footprint.at

Burger, E., Hinterberger, F., Giljum, S., Manstein, C. (2009)

Paper presented at R’09 Twin World Congress in Davos.

Consumers increasingly demand more transparent information about the sustainability performance of products and services. Thus companies aim at measuring and communicating the environmental performance of products. But which indicators enable a consistent measurement of the environmental sustainability of a product? Some major European initiatives have been launched, focusing in most cases on the indicator Carbon Footprint. But the Carbon Footprint does not take into account resource scarcity and trade-offs between different environmental categories, including the use of raw materials, water and land. In this paper, we present a pilot study assessing a more comprehensive set of indicators, which was conducted in 2008 with a number of Austrian companies. In contrast to the single indicator approach, a set of five indicators was selected and tested for the assessment of the environmental sustainability performance of products: Abiotic Material Rucksack, Biotic Material Rucksack, Water Rucksack, Actual Land Use and Carbon Footprint. In an ongoing Austrian research project, we currently explore, whether this indicator set can be further developed into an integrated and Web-based Business Resource Intensity Index (BRIX).

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Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.

On March 21-25 the fourth workshop of the EU-FP5 project MELIA (Mediterranean Dialogue on Integrated Water Management) was held in Amman, Jordan. For the dissemination of the project results SERI prepared a leaflet on Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) and Water Governance (WGOV) in English and Arabic.

The MELIA project aims at establishing a strategic dialogue between experts, scientists, consumers and producers on integrated water ressource management in the Mediteranean region. It is hence of greatest importance to make sure that project results, elaborated documents, etc are disseminated not only within the MELIA community, and not only in the English speaking part of the Mediterranean. Consequently, one of the deliverables foreseen for the workpackage 7 on Water Participatory Management and Water Governance with SERI as the workpackage leader was a leaflet informing of the most important conceptual issues, the main project outcomes and results. This leaflet was prepared in English and Arabic and can be downloaded here.

Pirgmaier, E., Hinterberger, F., Giljum, S. (2009)

Presentation held at the 2nd European Congress of Conservation Biology on 3 September in Prague.

The presentation contains

1. Why Growth may not continue forever
2. Possible next steps
3. Current initiatives

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Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.

Lutter, S., Wilting, H., Wiedmann, T., Palm, V., Giljum, S. (2008)

ERA-NET SKEP Project EIPOT (Development of a methodology for the assessment of global environmental impacts of traded goods and services)

1.1 Background
Issues related to environmental consequences of intensifying international trade have gained significant importance in European Union (EU) and worldwide policies in the past few years. This is emphasised, for example, in the revised EU Sustainable Development Strategy , the Thematic Strategy on the Sustainable Use of Natural Resources and in the upcoming EU Action Plan on Sustainable Consumption and Production. Products are increasingly produced in one part of the world, taken into another country and then redistributed to their final country of consumption. In order to promote and understand sustainable consumption and production, there is a need to capture the whole life cycle costs of products and services (in terms of emissions, water use, material flows, etc) in order to be able to fully quantify the environmental impacts of consumption and trade. However, there is an absence of an accepted approach towards quantifying and
assessing the trans-national impacts of consumption. Many existing methodologies such as life-cycle assessment (LCA), resource flow and material flow analysis rely on average data and do not easily allow for local impacts of production and consumption, or infrastructure associated with production, use and disposal. This is especially important when assessing products and services whose production-consumption chain spans across several national boundaries.

The SKEP network wishes to develop a suitable methodology to assess such trans-national environmental impacts and is funding the EIPOT Project (“environmental impacts of trade”). This project aims to bring together existing knowledge and ongoing research for the assessment of global environmental impacts of traded goods and services. It will review past and current accounting methodologies and then identify, specify and develop a suitable integrated approach, which can be applied by SKEP member states and other countries.

1.2 Aim of the project
The main objective of the EIPOT Project is to develop and specify an environmental accounting methodology which allows quantifying and assessing the trans-national environmental impacts of traded goods and services. More specifically, this project aims to:
• Review and comparatively evaluate a large number of existing environmental accounting techniques that allow to illustrate trans-national impacts of traded goods and services,
• Identify the most suitable methodology and develop it further into an accounting approach, which can be applied by all SKEP member states,
• Specify the (theoretical) framework and define criteria for environmental accounting methodologies to be suitable for the assessment of environmental impacts of imported and exported goods and services,
• Identify data requirements and suggest possible date sources for the improved methodology, and
• Elaborate the roles of different regulatory authorities in providing required data and advice on the practical implementation of the methodology.

1.3 Approach
The project aims to provide a comprehensive comparative assessment and evaluation of different methods and tools which are currently applied to assess the environmental implications of international trade. The project will identify and specify an accounting approach which is suited to the specific requirements of the SKEP member states. During the course of the project, the specific policy issues of SKEP member states relating to environmental pressures from traded products will be identified and the development of a suitable model will take these requirements into account from the beginning.

1.4 Interim Report (WP3)
The present interim report constitutes the deliverable of work package 3 (WP 3) – Review and comparative assessment of existing approaches – of the EIPOT project . The RACER evaluation framework developed in a previous work package has been applied to different environmental accounting approaches. The report contains the results of the evaluation in relation to trans-national impacts. In succession, WP 4 is devoted to the further methodological development and specification of the most suitable approach(es) identified in WP 3.

The following methods/approaches have been evaluated using the RACER framework:

• Life-cycle Analysis / Resource Accounting
  o LCA
  o MFA-LCA (MIPS)
  o National Ecological Footprint Accounts and variant methods
  o Water Footprint
• Environmental Input-Output Analysis
  o Single-Region IOA; emissions, energy and land use and EF
  o Single-Region IOA; materials
  o Single-Region IOA; water
  o Multi-Region IOA; emissions, energy, materials and land use
  o Multi-Region IOA; Ecological Footprint
• Hybrid approaches
  o Hybrid LCA (hybrid of IOA and Process Analysis)
• Dynamic Models
  o Econometric Models
  o Dynamic Ecological Footprint

A workshop has been organised as milestone of WP 3, where the group of stakeholders identified in WP 2 will review the draft results and contribute to the definition of the work undertaken in WP 4 and WP 5. It is also suggested that the three external experts of this consortium (NTNU, AKF, ISA/USyd) review and comment on the draft interim report and that at least two of the external experts be invited to attend the workshop. Based on the results of the assessment during the workshop a ranked short list of suitable methodologies will be compiled from which the most suitable will be selected for further development in WP 4.

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Wiedmann, T., Wilting, H., Lutter, S., Palm, V., Giljum, S., Wadeskog, A., Nijdam, D. (2009)

Final Report of the SKEP ERA-NET Project EIPOT. Environment Agency UK

In 2008, the SKEP (Scientific Knowledge for Environmental Protection) network commissioned research to develop a suitable methodology to assess transnational environmental impacts through international trade, which led to the establishment of the EIPOT project (environmental impacts of trade). The project was carried out between April 2008 and May 2009 by a consortium of four European research institutions: Stockholm Environment Institute at the University of York (project coordinator), Sustainable Europe Research Institute in Vienna, Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency in Bilthoven and Statistics Sweden in Stockholm.

The project aimed to:
• review and evaluate existing environmental accounting techniques that can be used to illustrate transnational impacts of traded goods and services;
• specify the (theoretical) framework and criteria for environmental accounting methodologies to assess the environmental impacts of imported and exported goods and services;
• identify the most suitable methodology and expand it into an accounting approach which can be used by all SKEP member states;
• identify data requirements and possible data sources for the recommended method;
• elaborate the roles of different regulatory authorities in providing the required data and advice on the practical implementation of the methodology.

During the project, it became clear that a) given the variety of possible research and policy questions to be answered, it would not be appropriate to stipulate one single method but rather put forward a flexible range of compatible methods and b) as a consequence, the focus should be on the developments needed in data and organisational roles. The EIPOT project report will be of interest and use to the SKEP network, national ministries and agencies, national statistical offices (NSO), the European Commission (EC) and Eurostat as well as academia.

In the EIPOT project, an evaluation approach called RACER was adapted for the purposes of the project. RACER is used by the European Commission Directorate General Environment to assess the suitability of methods and indicators for policy-oriented applications. On the basis of assessments carried out here, EIPOT makes recommendations for setting up a method able to fulfil the project’s aim of assessing transnational environmental impacts of traded goods and products. The suggested way forward is a methodology incorporating elements of different tools which have proven to be successful, and identification of future needs in order to develop an effective and applicable tool, rather than focussing on one approach and its further development.

The relevance and suitability of any methodology always depends on the particular research or policy question that needs to be answered. The report looked at five policy dimensions – economic, environmental pressure/impact, geography, time, and life cycle stage – in order to understand the specific requirements for the methodology. The primary focus of the EIPOT project was on trade flows between different economies and production sectors within them, rather than on individual traded products.

The report suggests that an ideal basis for a suitable EIPOT methodology would be an environmentally extended multi-region input-output (EE-MRIO) framework closely connected to the System of Economic and Environmental Accounts (SEEA).
The main elements of this accounting framework should include the following:
• monetary input-output tables of all EU countries plus an equal number of EU trading partners in a resolution of more than 100 economic sectors;
• detailed, bilateral trade datasets for goods and services in monetary (and possibly physical) units;
• complete tables of environmental accounts, further disaggregated with process analysis and LCA data, for a number of environmental extensions: emissions, material flows, energy use, land use, water use, air emissions, waste production, bioproductivity, biodiversity and other impact categories;
• For specific policy and research questions, data from process analysis and life cycle analysis (LCA) can be incorporated into hybrid approaches and/or to enumerate specific processes (such as international transportation or waste management practices).

The EIPOT project has not focused on one single method but on identifying a framework consisting of best-suited elements from different existing approaches, as such, the project outcome should be very useful for the task of assessing transnational environmental impacts through international trade. Not only does the project deliver a comprehensive review and evaluation of existing approaches but it also provides detailed elaborations on necessary future procedural steps regarding research needs, risks, and other related issues. Hence, the EIPOT project should be seen as an important step on the way towards a homogeneous and widely applied accounting method which will lead to more effective and target-oriented environmental policies.

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