Sweden takes the lead in measuring diverse environmental impacts of consumption
New accounting method could strengthen Sustainable Development Goals follow-up
A government-commission study shows how countries can measure progress on sustainable consumption, a priority under the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). A series of papers present the method, headline findings for Sweden, and a wealth of other consumption-related research carried out under the PRINCE project.
Official statistics on the greenhouse gas emissions associated with Swedish consumption will shortly be updated to capture emissions all along the country’s global supply chains. This will be done using a new approach developed in the PRINCE project and written up in a new special section of the Journal of Cleaner Production.
“It is very satisfying to see our research being adopted so quickly as official statistics and becoming a part of Sweden’s statistical system. I hope other countries will take up the challenge,” said Viveka Palm of Statistics Sweden (the national statistical bureau), who led the PRINCE project.
“The PRINCE model allows us to measure a range of global environmental pressures linked to the goods and services consumed in Sweden, and to do it at high enough quality to be used in national statistics,” said Elena Dawkins of Stockholm Environment Institute, who worked on developing the model as part of the PRINCE project.
A new SDG indicator for sustainable consumption?
Viveka Palm is also a co-chair of the Inter-agency and Expert Group on SDG Indicators (IAEG-SDGs), which is tasked with developing global indicators to monitor progress on the SDGs.
The tenth meeting of the IAEG-SDGs will be held from 21 to 24 October 2019 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The meeting will discuss how to improve the measurement and global follow up of the SDGs.
The sustainable development agenda calls on countries to ensure sustainable consumption and production. However, on the whole, the consumption-based perspective is missing from the global SDG indicators proposed by the UN.
“In a globalized world, measures of sustainable consumption must take into account environmental pressures linked to imported goods and services,” said Viveka Palm. “The approach we developed in PRINCE can measure how big some of these global impacts are for an individual country, and whether they are rising or falling.
“It would be relatively easy for countries to implement and to update. It is worth exploring as a way to complement the other SDG indicators,” said Palm.
Hotspots
The PRINCE model can also offer rich detail on were impacts are happening along the supply chain, and which consumed product groups they are linked to.
For example, it shows that producing the textiles consumed in Sweden in 2014 led to greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to just 4 tonnes of CO2 (4 tCO2e) in Sweden – but to 815 000 tCO2e in China, 363 000 tCO2e across the EU and 290 000 tCO2e in India, along with at least 10 000 tCO2e in another 27 countries or regions.
“The data underlines the fact that for wealthier countries, simply reducing your domestic greenhouse gas emissions is not enough; to ease pressure on the climate the whole world needs to get off fossil fuels, and that could mean working with producer countries to transform their energy systems too,” said Viveka Palm.
Read more in PRINCE academic papers
The PRINCE project also made methodological advances in the area of consumption-based accounting. A new special section of the Journal of Cleaner Production includes articles presenting the approach in detail along with headline findings and other research under the project. Below is a list of academic papers published by the project.
More about the on SDG Indicators meeting in Addis Ababa
https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/meetings/iaeg-sdgs-meeting-10/
Read publications by the PRINCE project: http://www.prince-project.se/publications/
More information and interviews, please contact:
Christel Cederberg (PRINCE food sector indicators) , Chalmers
christel.cederberg@chalmers.se; +46 (0)31-772 2218
Göran Finnveden (PRINCE hotspots analysis and chemicals indicators), KTH
goran.finnveden@abe.kth.se; +46(0)8-790 7318
Viveka Palm (PRINCE project lead), Statistics Sweden
viveka.palm@scb.se; +46 (0)10-479 4219
Caspar Trimmer (communications lead for PRINCE), Stockholm Environment Institute
caspar.trimmer@sei.org; +46 (0)73-270 4333 @SEIresearch
PRINCE was a three-year project supported under a research grant from the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency and the Swedish Agency for Water and Marine Management. It involved a consortium of Swedish and European research institutes: Stockholm Environment Institute, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Chalmers University, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), TNO and CML, led by Viveka Palm of Statistics Sweden. The website www.prince-project.se presents the research and visualizations of results.
NOTE: Swedish consumption data generated by the PRINCE project for 2008–2014 is available for download.
PRINCE project – selected academic papers
Environmental pressures from Swedish consumption: A hybrid multi-regional input-output approach This study presents the PRINCE model and offers headline macro indicators of the global environmental impacts of Swedish consumption for 2008–2014, including a range of greenhouse gas emissions, air pollutant emissions and use of natural resources.
Environmental pressure from Swedish consumption: The largest contributing producer countries, products and services Presents hotspots of the impacts of Swedish consumption – both geographic (where environmental pressures occur) and the product groups with the greatest impacts. Results generated using the PRINCE model.
The Swedish footprint: A multi-model comparison This article compares carbon footprint results for Swedish consumption from a range of models and offers insights and recommendations for developing the PRINCE model.
Beyond the borders: Burdens of Swedish food consumption due to agrochemicals, greenhouse gases and land-use change This article summarizes the main PRINCE findings on impacts from Swedish food consumption
Indicators for national consumption-based accounting of chemicals World-first indicators of the chemical use and emissions footprints of national consumption:
Improving consumption-based accounting for global capture fisheries A ground-breaking way of producing indicators for impacts of fish consumption that consider capture method and species, which have major implications for impacts on marine biodiversity.
A spatially explicit data-driven approach to calculating commodity-specific shipping emissions per vessel A new method to accurately calculate greenhouse gas and air pollution emissions from marine cargo shipping, and attribute them to countries, vessels and products.
Capturing the heterogeneity of sub-national production in global trade flows Where agricultural products are grown can make a huge difference to how they contribute to problems like deforestation, water scarcity and biodiversity loss. This article shows how consumption flows captured by a model like PRINCE can be traced back to specific production landscapes, not just the producer country, for finer-grained footprinting.
Deforestation displaced: Trade in forest-risk commodities and the prospects for a global forest transition Quantifies deforestation embedded in production of agricultural and forestry commodities across the tropics using a land-balance model, and then allocates them to consumer countries.
Understanding GHG emissions from Swedish consumption: Current challenges in reaching the Generational Goal An examination of changes in Sweden’s greenhouse gas footprint 1995–2014 and where it fell, with reference to the national policy goal of solving environmental and social problems in Sweden without increasing problems abroad.
Modeling reductions in the environmental footprints embodied in European Union’s imports through source shifting Asks how far shifting sources of goods and services consumed in Sweden could reduce Europe’s global environmental footprint.
A multi-impact analysis of changing ICT consumption patterns for Sweden and the EU: Indirect rebound effects and evidence of decoupling A PRINCE case study on information and communication technology consumption
A note on the magnitude of the feedback effect in environmentally extended multi-region input-output tables (2017). Explains how the PRINCE model deals with re-exports.
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