Relationship between human development and carbon emissions embodied in trade

Abstract

It has long been assumed that human development depends on economic growth, that national economic expansion in turn requires greater energy use and, therefore, increased greenhouse-gas emissions. These interdependences are the topic of current research. Scarcely explored, however, is the impact of international trade: although some nations develop socio-economically and import high-embodied-carbon products, it is likely that carbon-exporting countries gain significantly fewer benefits. Here, we use new consumption-based measures of national carbon emissions to explore how the relationship between human development and carbon changes when we adjust national emission rates for trade. Without such adjustment of emissions, some nations seem to be getting far better development ‘bang’ for the carbon ‘buck’ than others, who are showing scant gains for disproportionate shares of global emissions. Adjusting for the transfer of emissions through trade explains many of these outliers, but shows that further socio-economic benefits are accruing to carbon-importing rather than carbon-exporting countries. We also find that high life expectancies are compatible with low carbon emissions but high incomes are not. Finally, we see that, despite strong international trends, there is no deterministic industrial development trajectory: there is great diversity in pathways, and national histories do not necessarily follow the global trends.
 

Reference

Steinberger, J. K., J. T. Roberts, G. P. Peters and G. Baiocchi (2012). "Pathways of human development and carbon emissions embodied in trade." Nature Climate Change http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1371.
 
The article can be downloaded from Nature Climate Change (subscription needed).
 
The authors point out that this work is based on two previous articles:
 
Steinberger, J. K. and J. T. Roberts (2010). "From constraint to sufficiency: the decoupling of energy and carbon from human needs, 1975-2005." Ecological Economics 70(2): 425-433.
 
Peters, G. P., J. C. Minx, C. L. Weber and O. Edenhofer (2011). "Growth in emission transfers via international trade from 1990 to 2008." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108(21): 8903-8908.