Local consumption and territorial based accounting for CO2 emissions

We examine the complications involved in attributing emissions at a local level. Specifically, we look at how functional specialisation within a city region can, via trade between sub-regions, create emissions interdependencies; and how this complicates environmental policy implementation in an analogous manner to international trade at the national level. For this purpose we use a 3-region emissions extended input–output model of the Glasgow City region (2 regions: city and wider city-region) and the rest of Scotland. The model utilises data on household consumption to account for consumption flows across sub-regions and plant-level data on emissions from electricity generation to augment the top-down disaggregation of emissions. This enables a carbon attribution at the sub-regional level, which is used to analyse emissions interdependencies within the city-region.