Our thinking

GHG omissions

26 July, 2024

Sweden has good sustainability credentials – covered with forests and a large renewables output, it’s also the home of Greta Thunberg. And a recent update to the country’s net zero targets may give it a further boost.

The country has decided to set its net zero target against consumption-based emissions, rather than production-based emissions. While this may seem like a small technicality, in the EU (for example), around one third of emissions from consumption occur outside of the region’s borders. Both the producer and consumer have responsibility for emissions, but only looking at the emissions produced risks outsourcing emissions to other countries (through, for example, relying on imported goods) – something that has played a significant role in the UK’s progress on its own emissions target.

There are similarities with businesses’ requirement to include the embodied emissions of products and services they buy in their footprint calculations, as well as those they produce. And as anyone who has tried to measure scope 3 emissions will know, those emissions you have not produced directly yourself are harder to calculate than those you have.

And as with corporate emissions accounting, one of the main advantages of this overlapping way of accounting is that it shares responsibility for emissions. But as well as this, it puts the power (and the responsibility) to reduce emissions in the hands of individuals, who are more involved in decisions about consumption than production. Behaviour change therefore becomes key. In addition, it incentivises much-needed international climate finance and has a climate equity element.

There are lots of complexities to calculating consumption-based emissions, but the climate crisis is a complex issue. We need to give it everything we have if we’re going to tackle it effectively.

By Patrick Bapty