Caldeira Lab Research:Energy, Global Carbon Cycle, and Climate

Consumption-based accounting of CO2 emissions

S. Davis & K. Caldeira

Traditional production-based CO2 emissions records do not take into account CO2 emissions that are passed on to other countries. Here we find that almost one quarter of CO2 emissions from fossil fuels were emitted from the production of goods that were consumed in another country.

Davis, S. J., and K. Caldeira (2010), Consumption-based accounting of CO2 emissions, PNAS March 8, 2010, doi:10.1073/pnas.0906974107












Fig. 1: Largest interregional fluxes of emissions embodied in trade (Mt CO2 y−1) from dominant net exporting countries (blue) to the dominant net importing countries (red). Fluxes to and from Western Europe are aggregated to include the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, and Sweden.




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