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The problem of assigning responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions
Ecological Economics 49 (2004) 253 – 257 www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolecon
News and Views
The problem of assigning responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions Simone Bastianoni, Federico Maria Pulselli, Enzo Tiezzi * Department of Chemical and Biosystem Sciences, University of Siena, Via della Diana, 2, 53100 Siena, Italy A.R.C.A. Onlus, Associazione Ricerca e Consulenza Ambientale, Italy Received 4 December 2002; received in revised form 8 December 2003; accepted 26 January 2004 Available online
Abstract The paper discusses different methods to assign the responsibility for Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions: the geographical approach, based on the IPCC guidelines for GHG inventory; the consumer responsibility approach, based on the Ecological Footprint methodology; the Carbon Emission Added (CEA) approach that adopts the Embodied Energy-Emergy Analysis method. The last approach tries to solve the problem between the consumer and producer accounting principles, considering also the emissions of developing countries. D 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Greenhouse gas emissions; Climate change; Biodiversity
1. The problem of greenhouse gases emissions Nowadays, one of the points of major debate in international issues is the problem of the greenhouse effect and related climate change. The debate is still particularly lively due to the policy adopted by the last US governments, in contrast with the Kyoto Protocol signed in 1997 by industrialized countries to reduce collective greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by at least 5% compared to 1990 levels for the period 2008 –2012.
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +39-0577-232012; fax: +390577-232004 E-mail address: [email protected] (E. Tiezzi). 0921-8009/$ - see front matter D 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2004.01.018
Public opinion and environmental associations have mainly focused attention on the most evident effects of the problem, such as glaciers melting, water scarcity, or the extinction of species with irreparable damage to biodiversity, in addition to the main cause of the problem: massive fuel consumption. In order to abate the proliferation of GHGs and thus stop global warming, it is necessary to investigate deeply the major sources of GHGs: it is important not only to identify fuel consumption as the main source of these emissions, but also to localize where these gases are emitted, why they are emitted and which economic sectors are involved in the emission. However, without attributing responsibility for GHG emissions, their reduction and abatement will remain an arduous task. The scien-
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S. Bastianoni et al. / Ecological Economics 49 (2004) 253–257
tific community should thus draw more attention to the need for a fair accounting method to create a GHG inventory which also assigns responsibility for emissions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 1996) has defined a complete method to standardize the GHG inventory at a local level. In the guidelines set by the IPCC, GHG emissions data are mostly based on estimates, as emissions from very few sources can be measured directly and continuously. The estimate of emissions from each source is based on the assumption of a relationship between a certain activity and the emissions it generates. Furthermore, the emission factors are determined while taking national scenarios into account wherever possible. IPCC presents a rich database, including data from several nations at different levels of economic development, and recommends default emission factors when precise national data are not available. Unfortunately, such emission inventories may have a high degree of uncertainty due to process variability in space and time and appropriate estimation models are not always available. In their research on five industrialized countries, Rypdal and Winiwarter (2001) have calculated that the uncertainty of GHG inventories ranges within F 5 – 20%. This high uncertainty in the emission level may be also an obstacle for assessing cost-effective reduction strategies as well as for designing effective systems of emission trading between countries, as the Kyoto protocol provides for. Discussions about allocations of emission rights have started from a principle of territorial responsibility (see, e.g. Gupta and Bhandari, 1999; Neumayer, 2000). Ferng (2003) states that attention should be pointed towards the difference between GHGs production and caption (‘‘over-emissions’’). In alternative to the principle of territorial responsibility, other approaches have been proposed in order to suggest more efficacious and fair policies, mainly distinguishing between consumer and producer responsibility. For example, Munksgaard and Pedersen (2001) link the concept of responsibility to the production and consumption accounting principles. They show the difference between the two approaches in the case of a national system and develop the idea of a CO2 trade balance.
2. Producer or consumer responsibility? A GHG inventory is usually performed in order to account for the impact of a country or a generic system or process. If we consider the former situation, namely that of a nation which imports a great amount of marketable goods, different methods for tallying GHGs can be adopted. The first approach has been proposed by IPCC, which suggests merely applying a geographical approach: the accounting should only consider the CO2 emissions directly involved in each sector of the analyzed nation within the country boundaries. In this case, the contribution to global GHG emission is evaluated for each emission source at the local level without including, for example, fuel combustion indirectly related to the system, such as transportation. This is implicitly the method which is adopted when a GHG inventory is performed for sake of simplicity. But is this entirely fair? If we consider a country which only imports transformed goods, without transforming them within the country’s boundaries, we might observe a paradoxical situation of a high standard of living coupled with a very low level of GHG emissions. On the contrary, a country which produces goods for another country would have to ‘‘pay’’ for the CO2 associated with something they will never benefit from. This fact is even more evident when transportation is considered. A country which is crossed by trucks, for example, ‘‘pays’’ for GHG emissions associated with goods it has not produced and will not use. On the other hand, a country in which the same goods are used is assigned an amount of GHG for transportation which may be negligible. These considerations have driven to an opposite accounting perspective based on the consumer responsibility (see, e.g. Proops et al., 1993, 1999; Munksgaard and Pedersen, 2001; Ferng, 2003), that can be regarded in the same stream as the Ecological Footprint approach. The Ecological Footprint was proposed by Wackernagel and Rees (1996). For a debate on Ecological Footprint, see the March 2000 issue of this journal (Ecological Economics, 2000). In their opinion, every economic activity, be it performed by a single individual or a whole country, has an impact on the Earth due to the consumption of nature’s products and
S. Bastianoni et al. / Ecological Economics 49 (2004) 253–257
services, so the ecological impact corresponds to the amount of natural wealth destroyed, consumed, altered or occupied. The Ecological Footprint is based on the actual consumption of goods by a country’s inhabitants, so if something is produced in country X and used in country Y, the land requirement is registered totally within country Y. Thus, if the consumer of a final product is responsible for the entire ecological impact of the process which has generated that product, the consumer should be charged for the total emissions related to the process. The GHG inventory, carried out on the basis of the Ecological Footprint approach, would as a result assign a lower level of GHG emissions to developing countries and a higher level to developed ones. This type of accounting would be fairer because it would make final users pay the GHG ‘‘bill’’, but it would lower the incentive for developing countries to create cleaner and more efficient production processes. In any case, this solution would avoid the problem of having to transfer production from countries with limited emissions towards developing countries (with almost no limit on emissions). Assuming a consumer responsibility viewpoint, producers are not directly motivated to reduce emissions, while consumers, instead, should in theory assume responsibility for choosing the best strategies and policy by showing a preference for producers who are attentive to GHG reductions. However, without adequate incentives or policies, consumers are not likely to be sensitive with respect to their environmental responsibilities, having in fact no consumption limits.
3. A possible trade off A ‘‘softer’’ alternative might be the adoption of a sort of Embodied Energy-Emergy Analysis method (Odum, 1996). In this case, a process can be divided in several steps and, for each of these, a single consumer and producer are defined. We can then suppose that each consumer is responsible for the emissions relative to the corresponding step and is therefore co-responsible for the emissions generated by suppliers of goods and services. For instance, we can image a chain of countries or processes (e.g. from extraction of raw materials to the final use of a
255
transformed good) and we can tally all the GHGs, that are embodied, ‘‘accumulated’’ or ‘‘memorized’’ along the chain. Following this reasoning, the total GHG emission should be assigned to countries or phases of the process in proportion to the embodied GHG emissions needed along the chain. This perspective can be seen as a ‘‘Carbon Emission Added’’ (CEA) approach. In the following example, we compare these approaches by proposing an ideal situation. We image a chain with three systems: A, B and C (these might be different countries or phases of the same process), the producer, an intermediate system and the final consumer, respectively. The emissions of the three systems are, respectively, 50, 30 and 20 units. The IPCC approach (production accounting principle) applies the geographical perspective and attributes the emissions as follows: System A: 50 units System B: 30 units System C: 20 units However, if we consider the problem of GHG responsibility we might adopt a different method. The Ecological Footprint approach (consumption accounting principle) attributes all the emissions to the final consumer (System C), as is shown below: System A: 0 units System B: 0 units System C: 100 units Finally, the CEA approach holds System A responsible for 50 units, System B co-responsible for 80 units (30 plus 50 for System A), and System C coresponsible for 100 units (20 plus 50 for System A and 30 for System B). In all, the three systems would be co-responsible for 230 units; but with this approach the attribution of responsibility would be: System A 50/230 = 22 units System B 80/230 = 35 units System C 100/230 = 43 units These figures represent an intermediate approach, as all the GHG emissions are accounted for, whether related directly or indirectly to each system. In this
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S. Bastianoni et al. / Ecological Economics 49 (2004) 253–257
way, on one hand, consumers are encouraged to find those producers with the best environmental performances, on the other hand producers are anyway involved in the responsibility of the emissions and thus encouraged to reduce them.
4. Conclusions We have presented a carbon emission added approach to assign the responsibility of GHG emissions in a measure that is a trade-off between consumption and a production accounting principles. In our opinion, this approach allows to share the responsibilities among all the interested subjects in an efficacious and fairer way: consumers are taken as responsible for most of the emissions but have the possibility to choose the optimal producer; producers are subject to a minor but precise imputation of responsibility. This solution allows to consider also the emissions by developing countries and therefore it might aid in persuading at least some US Senators to re-examine the Kyoto protocol. CEA practical feasibility is a difficult task but this approach resembles a value-added tax (even if not purely market oriented), for which there is a history of implementation. Anyway, there are already some stimulating starting points in order to account for GHGs trade balance between systems (see, e.g. Munksgaard and Pedersen, 2001; Atkinson and Hamilton, 2002). Future perspectives in developing these ideas must embrace the crucial point of transportation. Transportation of people and goods is one of the major gas emission factors. Emissions due to the transportation of materials are usually attributed to the country where the fuel is consumed, without considering the responsibility of the producer or the consumer of marketable articles that are transported. However, the responsibility of the emissions due to the transportation of raw materials for the production of saleable goods and to the transportation of these goods to the market is one of the most important problems when GHG emissions sources are investigated. Generally, gas emissions due to materials or product transportation and production are considered part of local energy consumption and are attributed to the
system or country where the fuels are distributed without considering why these fuels are burnt, who benefits from their use and thus who is responsible for their consumption. Is it right, for example, to assign producer-countries with the GHG emissions due to fuel consumption by trucks, as transport is finalized to the economic profit of the country? And is it correct to attribute these emissions, at least in part, to the areas the trucks come from and are directed to? In other words, it is not right for truck traffic to lower the sustainability of the producercountry. Instead, its negative impact should be attributed at least in part to the areas of destination for the goods. Since trade is an activity that involves two parties, the responsibility for these emissions should probably be shared by producers and consumercountries. In this way, fuel consumption could be accounted for by considering frontiers between two systems. In any case, the aim of this paper is not to propose ultimate solutions but to affirm the principle that GHG emissions need to be taken into account and that attribution fairness remains an open question for future debate.
Acknowledgements The authors wish to thank Margherita Panzieri and Marcello Porcelli for their contribution at early stages of this paper. We are very indebted to anonymous reviewers for their precious comments and suggestions.
References Atkinson, G., Hamilton, K., 2002. International trade and the ‘ecological balance of payments’. Resources Policy 28, 27 – 37. Ecological Economics 32 (3) (2000) (and all the papers therein). Ferng, J.J., 2003. Allocating the responsibility of CO2 over-emissions from the perspectives of benefit principle and ecological deficit. Ecological Economics 46, 121 – 141. Gupta, S., Bhandari, P.M., 1999. An effective allocation criterion for CO2 emissions. Energy Policy 27, 727 – 736. IPCC, 1996. Guidelines for national greenhouse gas inventories, vol. 1 – 3. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, London. Munksgaard, J., Pedersen, K.A., 2001. CO2 accounts for open economies: producer or consumer responsibility? Energy Policy 29, 327 – 334.
S. Bastianoni et al. / Ecological Economics 49 (2004) 253–257 Neumayer, E., 2000. In defence of historical accountability for greenhouse gas emissions. Ecological Economics 33, 185 – 192. Odum, H.T., 1996. Environmental Accounting: Emergy and Environmental Decision Making. Wiley, New York. 370 pp. Proops, J.L.R., Faber, M., Wagenhals, G., 1993. Reducing CO2 Emissions: A Comparative Input – Output Study for Germany and the UK Springer, Berlin. Proops, J.L.R., Atkinson, G., v. Schlotheim, B.F., Simon, S., 1999.
257
International trade and the sustainability footprint: a practical criterion for its assessment. Ecological Economics 28, 75 – 97. Rypdal, K., Winiwarter, W., 2001. Uncertainties in greenhouse gas emission inventories—evaluation, comparability and implications. Environmental Science and Policy 4, 107 – 116. Wackernagel, M., Rees, W.E., 1996. Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth. New Society, Gabriola Island, BC, Canada. 176 pp.
News and Views
The problem of assigning responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions Simone Bastianoni, Federico Maria Pulselli, Enzo Tiezzi * Department of Chemical and Biosystem Sciences, University of Siena, Via della Diana, 2, 53100 Siena, Italy A.R.C.A. Onlus, Associazione Ricerca e Consulenza Ambientale, Italy Received 4 December 2002; received in revised form 8 December 2003; accepted 26 January 2004 Available online
Abstract The paper discusses different methods to assign the responsibility for Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions: the geographical approach, based on the IPCC guidelines for GHG inventory; the consumer responsibility approach, based on the Ecological Footprint methodology; the Carbon Emission Added (CEA) approach that adopts the Embodied Energy-Emergy Analysis method. The last approach tries to solve the problem between the consumer and producer accounting principles, considering also the emissions of developing countries. D 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Greenhouse gas emissions; Climate change; Biodiversity
1. The problem of greenhouse gases emissions Nowadays, one of the points of major debate in international issues is the problem of the greenhouse effect and related climate change. The debate is still particularly lively due to the policy adopted by the last US governments, in contrast with the Kyoto Protocol signed in 1997 by industrialized countries to reduce collective greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by at least 5% compared to 1990 levels for the period 2008 –2012.
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +39-0577-232012; fax: +390577-232004 E-mail address: [email protected] (E. Tiezzi). 0921-8009/$ - see front matter D 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2004.01.018
Public opinion and environmental associations have mainly focused attention on the most evident effects of the problem, such as glaciers melting, water scarcity, or the extinction of species with irreparable damage to biodiversity, in addition to the main cause of the problem: massive fuel consumption. In order to abate the proliferation of GHGs and thus stop global warming, it is necessary to investigate deeply the major sources of GHGs: it is important not only to identify fuel consumption as the main source of these emissions, but also to localize where these gases are emitted, why they are emitted and which economic sectors are involved in the emission. However, without attributing responsibility for GHG emissions, their reduction and abatement will remain an arduous task. The scien-
254
S. Bastianoni et al. / Ecological Economics 49 (2004) 253–257
tific community should thus draw more attention to the need for a fair accounting method to create a GHG inventory which also assigns responsibility for emissions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 1996) has defined a complete method to standardize the GHG inventory at a local level. In the guidelines set by the IPCC, GHG emissions data are mostly based on estimates, as emissions from very few sources can be measured directly and continuously. The estimate of emissions from each source is based on the assumption of a relationship between a certain activity and the emissions it generates. Furthermore, the emission factors are determined while taking national scenarios into account wherever possible. IPCC presents a rich database, including data from several nations at different levels of economic development, and recommends default emission factors when precise national data are not available. Unfortunately, such emission inventories may have a high degree of uncertainty due to process variability in space and time and appropriate estimation models are not always available. In their research on five industrialized countries, Rypdal and Winiwarter (2001) have calculated that the uncertainty of GHG inventories ranges within F 5 – 20%. This high uncertainty in the emission level may be also an obstacle for assessing cost-effective reduction strategies as well as for designing effective systems of emission trading between countries, as the Kyoto protocol provides for. Discussions about allocations of emission rights have started from a principle of territorial responsibility (see, e.g. Gupta and Bhandari, 1999; Neumayer, 2000). Ferng (2003) states that attention should be pointed towards the difference between GHGs production and caption (‘‘over-emissions’’). In alternative to the principle of territorial responsibility, other approaches have been proposed in order to suggest more efficacious and fair policies, mainly distinguishing between consumer and producer responsibility. For example, Munksgaard and Pedersen (2001) link the concept of responsibility to the production and consumption accounting principles. They show the difference between the two approaches in the case of a national system and develop the idea of a CO2 trade balance.
2. Producer or consumer responsibility? A GHG inventory is usually performed in order to account for the impact of a country or a generic system or process. If we consider the former situation, namely that of a nation which imports a great amount of marketable goods, different methods for tallying GHGs can be adopted. The first approach has been proposed by IPCC, which suggests merely applying a geographical approach: the accounting should only consider the CO2 emissions directly involved in each sector of the analyzed nation within the country boundaries. In this case, the contribution to global GHG emission is evaluated for each emission source at the local level without including, for example, fuel combustion indirectly related to the system, such as transportation. This is implicitly the method which is adopted when a GHG inventory is performed for sake of simplicity. But is this entirely fair? If we consider a country which only imports transformed goods, without transforming them within the country’s boundaries, we might observe a paradoxical situation of a high standard of living coupled with a very low level of GHG emissions. On the contrary, a country which produces goods for another country would have to ‘‘pay’’ for the CO2 associated with something they will never benefit from. This fact is even more evident when transportation is considered. A country which is crossed by trucks, for example, ‘‘pays’’ for GHG emissions associated with goods it has not produced and will not use. On the other hand, a country in which the same goods are used is assigned an amount of GHG for transportation which may be negligible. These considerations have driven to an opposite accounting perspective based on the consumer responsibility (see, e.g. Proops et al., 1993, 1999; Munksgaard and Pedersen, 2001; Ferng, 2003), that can be regarded in the same stream as the Ecological Footprint approach. The Ecological Footprint was proposed by Wackernagel and Rees (1996). For a debate on Ecological Footprint, see the March 2000 issue of this journal (Ecological Economics, 2000). In their opinion, every economic activity, be it performed by a single individual or a whole country, has an impact on the Earth due to the consumption of nature’s products and
S. Bastianoni et al. / Ecological Economics 49 (2004) 253–257
services, so the ecological impact corresponds to the amount of natural wealth destroyed, consumed, altered or occupied. The Ecological Footprint is based on the actual consumption of goods by a country’s inhabitants, so if something is produced in country X and used in country Y, the land requirement is registered totally within country Y. Thus, if the consumer of a final product is responsible for the entire ecological impact of the process which has generated that product, the consumer should be charged for the total emissions related to the process. The GHG inventory, carried out on the basis of the Ecological Footprint approach, would as a result assign a lower level of GHG emissions to developing countries and a higher level to developed ones. This type of accounting would be fairer because it would make final users pay the GHG ‘‘bill’’, but it would lower the incentive for developing countries to create cleaner and more efficient production processes. In any case, this solution would avoid the problem of having to transfer production from countries with limited emissions towards developing countries (with almost no limit on emissions). Assuming a consumer responsibility viewpoint, producers are not directly motivated to reduce emissions, while consumers, instead, should in theory assume responsibility for choosing the best strategies and policy by showing a preference for producers who are attentive to GHG reductions. However, without adequate incentives or policies, consumers are not likely to be sensitive with respect to their environmental responsibilities, having in fact no consumption limits.
3. A possible trade off A ‘‘softer’’ alternative might be the adoption of a sort of Embodied Energy-Emergy Analysis method (Odum, 1996). In this case, a process can be divided in several steps and, for each of these, a single consumer and producer are defined. We can then suppose that each consumer is responsible for the emissions relative to the corresponding step and is therefore co-responsible for the emissions generated by suppliers of goods and services. For instance, we can image a chain of countries or processes (e.g. from extraction of raw materials to the final use of a
255
transformed good) and we can tally all the GHGs, that are embodied, ‘‘accumulated’’ or ‘‘memorized’’ along the chain. Following this reasoning, the total GHG emission should be assigned to countries or phases of the process in proportion to the embodied GHG emissions needed along the chain. This perspective can be seen as a ‘‘Carbon Emission Added’’ (CEA) approach. In the following example, we compare these approaches by proposing an ideal situation. We image a chain with three systems: A, B and C (these might be different countries or phases of the same process), the producer, an intermediate system and the final consumer, respectively. The emissions of the three systems are, respectively, 50, 30 and 20 units. The IPCC approach (production accounting principle) applies the geographical perspective and attributes the emissions as follows: System A: 50 units System B: 30 units System C: 20 units However, if we consider the problem of GHG responsibility we might adopt a different method. The Ecological Footprint approach (consumption accounting principle) attributes all the emissions to the final consumer (System C), as is shown below: System A: 0 units System B: 0 units System C: 100 units Finally, the CEA approach holds System A responsible for 50 units, System B co-responsible for 80 units (30 plus 50 for System A), and System C coresponsible for 100 units (20 plus 50 for System A and 30 for System B). In all, the three systems would be co-responsible for 230 units; but with this approach the attribution of responsibility would be: System A 50/230 = 22 units System B 80/230 = 35 units System C 100/230 = 43 units These figures represent an intermediate approach, as all the GHG emissions are accounted for, whether related directly or indirectly to each system. In this
256
S. Bastianoni et al. / Ecological Economics 49 (2004) 253–257
way, on one hand, consumers are encouraged to find those producers with the best environmental performances, on the other hand producers are anyway involved in the responsibility of the emissions and thus encouraged to reduce them.
4. Conclusions We have presented a carbon emission added approach to assign the responsibility of GHG emissions in a measure that is a trade-off between consumption and a production accounting principles. In our opinion, this approach allows to share the responsibilities among all the interested subjects in an efficacious and fairer way: consumers are taken as responsible for most of the emissions but have the possibility to choose the optimal producer; producers are subject to a minor but precise imputation of responsibility. This solution allows to consider also the emissions by developing countries and therefore it might aid in persuading at least some US Senators to re-examine the Kyoto protocol. CEA practical feasibility is a difficult task but this approach resembles a value-added tax (even if not purely market oriented), for which there is a history of implementation. Anyway, there are already some stimulating starting points in order to account for GHGs trade balance between systems (see, e.g. Munksgaard and Pedersen, 2001; Atkinson and Hamilton, 2002). Future perspectives in developing these ideas must embrace the crucial point of transportation. Transportation of people and goods is one of the major gas emission factors. Emissions due to the transportation of materials are usually attributed to the country where the fuel is consumed, without considering the responsibility of the producer or the consumer of marketable articles that are transported. However, the responsibility of the emissions due to the transportation of raw materials for the production of saleable goods and to the transportation of these goods to the market is one of the most important problems when GHG emissions sources are investigated. Generally, gas emissions due to materials or product transportation and production are considered part of local energy consumption and are attributed to the
system or country where the fuels are distributed without considering why these fuels are burnt, who benefits from their use and thus who is responsible for their consumption. Is it right, for example, to assign producer-countries with the GHG emissions due to fuel consumption by trucks, as transport is finalized to the economic profit of the country? And is it correct to attribute these emissions, at least in part, to the areas the trucks come from and are directed to? In other words, it is not right for truck traffic to lower the sustainability of the producercountry. Instead, its negative impact should be attributed at least in part to the areas of destination for the goods. Since trade is an activity that involves two parties, the responsibility for these emissions should probably be shared by producers and consumercountries. In this way, fuel consumption could be accounted for by considering frontiers between two systems. In any case, the aim of this paper is not to propose ultimate solutions but to affirm the principle that GHG emissions need to be taken into account and that attribution fairness remains an open question for future debate.
Acknowledgements The authors wish to thank Margherita Panzieri and Marcello Porcelli for their contribution at early stages of this paper. We are very indebted to anonymous reviewers for their precious comments and suggestions.
References Atkinson, G., Hamilton, K., 2002. International trade and the ‘ecological balance of payments’. Resources Policy 28, 27 – 37. Ecological Economics 32 (3) (2000) (and all the papers therein). Ferng, J.J., 2003. Allocating the responsibility of CO2 over-emissions from the perspectives of benefit principle and ecological deficit. Ecological Economics 46, 121 – 141. Gupta, S., Bhandari, P.M., 1999. An effective allocation criterion for CO2 emissions. Energy Policy 27, 727 – 736. IPCC, 1996. Guidelines for national greenhouse gas inventories, vol. 1 – 3. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, London. Munksgaard, J., Pedersen, K.A., 2001. CO2 accounts for open economies: producer or consumer responsibility? Energy Policy 29, 327 – 334.
S. Bastianoni et al. / Ecological Economics 49 (2004) 253–257 Neumayer, E., 2000. In defence of historical accountability for greenhouse gas emissions. Ecological Economics 33, 185 – 192. Odum, H.T., 1996. Environmental Accounting: Emergy and Environmental Decision Making. Wiley, New York. 370 pp. Proops, J.L.R., Faber, M., Wagenhals, G., 1993. Reducing CO2 Emissions: A Comparative Input – Output Study for Germany and the UK Springer, Berlin. Proops, J.L.R., Atkinson, G., v. Schlotheim, B.F., Simon, S., 1999.
257
International trade and the sustainability footprint: a practical criterion for its assessment. Ecological Economics 28, 75 – 97. Rypdal, K., Winiwarter, W., 2001. Uncertainties in greenhouse gas emission inventories—evaluation, comparability and implications. Environmental Science and Policy 4, 107 – 116. Wackernagel, M., Rees, W.E., 1996. Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth. New Society, Gabriola Island, BC, Canada. 176 pp.