Database for analyzing environmental footprints and Green Economy Progress

Highlights

• Database covers 189 countries, 163 sectors, and a set of environmental indicators
• Automated approach to improve the resolution and indicator coverage of MRIO database
• Higher resolution raises the EU’s water stress and biodiversity loss footprint by up to 20%
• Half of the EU’s water stress footprint is induced in countries aggregated in EXIOBASE3
• Few countries achieved their green economy progress target for carbon, water, and land

Abstract

Moving towards a greener economy requires detailed information on the environmental impacts of global value chains. Environmentally-extended multi-regional input-output (MRIO) analysis plays a key role in providing this information, but current databases are limited in their spatial (e.g. EXIOBASE3) or sectoral resolution (e.g. Eora26 and GTAP) as well as their indicator coverage. Here, we present an automated, transparent, and comparably time-efficient approach to improve the resolution, quality, and indicator coverage of an existing MRIO database. Applied on EXIOBASE3, we disaggregate and improve the limited spatial resolution by weighting each element with country and sector specific shares derived from Eora26, FAOSTAT, and previous studies. The resolved database covers 189 countries, 163 sectors, and a cutting-edge set of environmental and socio-economic indicators from the years 1995 to 2015.

The importance of our improvements is highlighted by the EU-27 results, which reveal a significant increase in the EU’s water stress and biodiversity loss footprint as a result of the spatial disaggregation and regionalized assessment. In 2015, a third of the EU’s water stress and half of its biodiversity loss footprint was caused in the countries aggregated as rest of the world in EXIOBASE3. This was mainly attributed to the EU’s food imports, which induce comparably high water stress and biodiversity loss in Egypt and Madagascar, respectively. In a second example, we use our database to add carbon, water stress and biodiversity loss footprints to the Green Economy Progress (GEP) Measurement Framework.

Most countries have not achieved their environmental target and many countries, facing strong future population growth, show increasing footprints. Our results demonstrate that far more action is needed to move towards a greener economy globally, especially through supply chain management. The attached database provides detailed information on the environmental impacts of global value chains to plan efficient strategies for a greener economy.