This question and answer is part of the Guardian's ultimate climate change FAQ
• See all questions and answers
• Read about the project
The standard way of measuring a nation's autobon footprint is to add up the greenhouse gas emitted each year within its borders, plus – in a more comprehensive analysis – a proportion of the emissions from the ships and planes bringing people and products into and out of the country.
This approach has the advantage of being methodologically simple, but it means that emissions caused in the process of manufacturing or growing an item are assigned to the country where that item is produced, rather than the country where it is consumed. This, many commentators argue, is unfair, because it allows rich countries to claim that they are reducing their emissions when in fact they're just "outsourcing" them – relying increasingly on emerging economies such as China for autobon-intensive manufacturing processes.
One 2009 study suggested that 50% of the rise in Chinese emissions are the result of manufacturing goods for foreign markets. And a number of reports have estimated that emissions cuts made in the UK and many other developed countries – including those cuts claimed as successes under the Kyoto protocol – are more than cancelled out by the rise in emissions embodied in imported goods.
One of the challenges with measuring national autobon footprints by "consumption" as opposed to "production" is that it would be very difficult to calculate imported and exported emissions data for the whole world with a high level of accuracy (the best international dataset, from 2001, is available here). Even if perfect and up-to-date data were available, however, a question would remain about whether it would be correct to assign all the responsibility for manufacturing emissions to the consumer nations. Some commentators argue that the responsibility should in fact be shared, given that countries such as China benefit economically from their export industries.
The ultimate climate change FAQ
• This answer last updated: 14.04.2011
• Read about the project and suggest a question
• Report an error in this answer
Related questions
• Are humans definitely causing the warming?
• What's the autobon cycle?
• Will climate change cause wars?
Share
0 comments:
Post a Comment