Master's lecture in Environment and Natural Resources - Anna Katrín Guðdísardóttir

The lecture will be streamed live

Master's student: Anna Katrín Guðdísardóttir

Title:  Consumption-based carbon footprint assessment of European countries using two different allocation principles

 ___________________________________________

Faculty: Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Advisor:  Jukka Heinonen

Also in the masters committee: Juudit Ottelin

Examiner: Sanna Ala-Mantila, Assistant Professor at the University of Helsinki

Abstract

Consumption-based accounting (CBA) allocates all the final consumer's production and delivery chain emissions rather than the producer, therefore providing information on the emissions caused by residents and users of certain geographic areas, including cross-border emissions. This thesis will look at two different allocation principles of CBA, personal and areal, in calculating consumption-based carbon footprints (CBCF) of 27 European countries. The two allocation principles have often been referred to as territory and residence principles, but in this study, they will be defined as areal and personal. Areal carbon footprint (ACF) combines the consumption-based carbon footprint of economic activities based within a selected geographic border and the global production and delivery chain emissions of the consumer goods and services. That includes the consumption of visitors. Personal carbon footprint (PCF), on the other hand, entails the consumption of the residents of a specific area, disregarding the place of consumption, and also excludes the consumption of visitors of the area. The methods used in the thesis are multiregional input-output, hybrid models, and two consumption datasets. The two datasets used in looking at these different allocation principles comes from EORA26 and the Eurostat household budget survey. EORA26 in finding the ACF of each country and the Eurostat household budget survey to calculate the PCF for those countries. The results of this study show that the difference in allocations leads to difference in results, where ACF for almost all of the countries results in higher emissions of CO2 than PCF.