Policy-relevant assessments of carbon footprints

Statistics on emissions of greenhouse gases from the Swedish consumption are calculated on a regular basis.

The method, now implemented by Statistics Sweden, was developed in previous research projects and combine data from the Swedish System for Environmental and Economic Accounts, and an international Environmentally Extended Multi-Regional Input-Output Analysis (MRIO) model.

Data from these calculations are currently used in a number of applications and policy processes on both national and local levels.

The methods do however have some limitations which were described for example by the cross-party parliamentary committee on consumption-based climate goals.

These include the need to increase the granularity of data for some product groups and the possibilities to make future scenarios for the consumption-based emission.The overall aim of this project is to improve data and methods for calculating consumption-based emissions as well as testing the new methods in policy-relevant scenarios.

Data and methods will be improved for food products, impacts from aviation and biofuels. A MRIO model currently developed by Eurostat will be evaluated for possible use in future statistics.

Methods for calculating future scenarios for emissions of greenhouse gases from Swedish consumption will be developed for the same methodological framework that the current statistics are produced by. Different types of future scenarios will be calculated.