Carbon calculators
Theme leaders Per Christensen, Professor, Alborg University
Jannick Højrup Schmidt, assistant professor in LCA, Aalborg University, Director of the LCA-consultancy firm 2.0, Denmark
Theme description:
The carbon footprint concept has in many respects taken the lead when it comes to assessing environmental impacts. This goes for countries and local authorities as well as for companies and individual persons or families. For countries IPCC provide a framework and for companies the guidelines of WBCSD, ISO and the newly developed “Public Available Specification” from British Standard covers their needs.
Also for persons and families “Carbon Footprint” can be calculated and then used for decision making often as smart “calculators” that easily sum of the burden of the family or the emissions from an individual commuter. These results are often presented together with the opportunity to buy different kinds of “carbon offsetting”. A multitude of such carbon calculators has been developed both by consultancy firms, NGO and private companies. Most of these calculators are not reliable as their system delimitation and other methodological questions as well are not addressed in a transparent manner. Comparisons between different “calculators” have shown big differences, so generally results are not comparable.
Even more troublesome it is for local authorities who wish to contribute to a “low carbon society” to make a proper calculation of the emissions. The reason for this is often connected with the problems in attributing the transportation to the individual local communities as well as attributing the total environmental costs from production of goods to the same entity.
The objective of this theme is to get an overview of this wide range of “carbon calculators” and ask the following questions:
- How does existing “Carbon Calculators” perform?
- How should a “Carbon Calculator” be made so that it is transparent and comparable. Should detailed and systematic guidelines be developed?
- What are the delimitations of the “Carbon Calculator” when it comes to the goods consumed and transportation.
- How is offsetting made and is it done in a transparent way so that changes like afforestation and new renewable energy investments can be verified. Can rules for offsetting be formulated ?
Session 1: A view of different carbon calculators for local authorities – opportunities and challenges for future IA practice
Session Format - A presentation session with opportunities for delegates to ask questions and discuss the issues raised with presenters.
Learning Format- The session will provide delegates with a broad overview of tools being used in local authorities across Europe and learn about current weakness and the direction research is progressing.
Presentations in session 1:
- Kasper Dam Mikkelsen (Niras A/S), Niels Karim Høst-Madsen (Niras A/S) and Jannick Højrup Schmidt (2.0) Denmark. Carbon Footprints on business sectors and individuals in municipalities
- Kasper Dam Mikkelsen (Niras A/S), Niels Karim Høst-Madsen (Niras A/S) and Jannick Højrup Schmidt (2.0) Denmark. Shortcut to corporate sustainability reports – combining financial statement and input-output databases
- Janine De Fence (University of Strathclyde), Max Munday (University of Cardiff) and Karen Turner (University of Stirling) United Kingdom. The impacts of regional production and consumption activity on pollution generation: developing a user-friendly carbon counting tool.
Session 2: Unintended consequences of using carbon calculators (carbon footprint) in IA and decision making – how to avoid pitfalls
Session Format - A presentation session with opportunities for delegates to ask questions and discuss the issues raised with presenters.
Learning OutcomesThe session will provide delegates with a broad overview of problems associated with the use of carbon calculators (carbon footprint) especially at the local level of society.
Presentations in session 2:
- Trakarn Propaspongsa, Lone Kørnøv, Jannick Højrup Schmidt, Aalborg University, Danish Centre for Environmental Assessment. GREEN or GREY? How can delimitation of system boundary lead to misleading results? A case study from biomass power production
- Karen Turner, University of Stirling, United Kingdom. efficiency and rebound effects – an example of the ‘law of unintended consequences.
Presentation abstracts, session 1:
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Carbon Footprints on business sectors and individuals in municipalities.
Kasper Dam Mikkelsen, NIRAS, Niels Karim Høst-Madsen, NIRAS & Jannick H. Schmidt, 2.-0 LCA consultants
In an effort to reduce GHG emissions many Danish municipalities have devised plans to reduce their impact on climate change. Their primary focus has been to reduce GHG emissions from their own administration and institutions, however; recent initiatives indicate that municipalities are taking an interest in mapping emissions in a broader perspective and thus mapping emissions from the entire society.
Therefore the Capital Region of Denmark has decided to use a method that;
- Calculates the global carbon footprint from the business sectors in the Region (production perspective)
- Calculates the global carbon footprint from citizens in the Region (consumption perspective)
The work is being carried out by NIRAS, 2.-0 LCA consultants, the Centre for Regional and Tourism Research and Statistics Denmark. The applied method is specifically developed to map 29 Municipalities in the Capital Region, but it can easily be used by other Danish municipalities. With some alterations the same method can even be transferred to map regions in other countries, if they hold reliable national statistics on economy and consumption.
Calculating the carbon footprint in a consumption perspective entails a result around 18-20 tons per year per capita for the Capital Region. This is highly due to the high income level in the region, which entails high spending on goods, foods and travels.
Thus, the results suggest that the municipalities should put even more attention into how their citizens consume. The municipalities are in a great position to start climate actions that are aimed towards consumptions patterns, since it is a natural prolongation of their current work with environmental issues (Agenda 21).
This presentation will present how the calculations were made, and how the results were translated into specific actions.
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Shortcut to Corporate sustainability reports – combining financial statement and input-output databases
Kasper Dam Mikkelsen, NIRAS, Niels Karim Høst-Madsen, NIRAS & Jannick H. Schmidt, 2.-0 LCA consultants
There is an increasing focus of having including life cycle based information in corporate sustainability reports. This is done by including the emissions outside the boundary of the company that are caused by the activities and decisions in the company. An example is the World Resource Institute (WRI) and World Business Council for Sustainable Development’s (WBCSD) with the GHG-protocols (http://www.ghgprotocol.org/).
When calculating the life cycle emissions, the principles in life cycle assessment in ISO 14040/44 are used. The traditional and most used method for calculating life cycle emissions is following the physical flows upstream and downstream in the product chains, where detailed data are collected and compiled for each stage in the life cycle of the product flows. The working procedure for this is characterised as a bottom-up processes which is very time consuming. Despite the fact that significant efforts are put in the process of making the life cycle information as accurate and complete, the absolute emissions are typically underestimated due to incompleteness of data.
An alternative to the traditional bottom-up process of making LCAs is the top-down approach; input-output LCA (IO-LCA). The data in IO-LCA are based on monetary supply and use tables representing the national account for a country extended with a national emissions account. Since the data represent completeness in economic coverage and total emissions, data are by definition complete.
IO-data can be used for calculating the life cycle emissions for a number of product categories (typically 60-150) in unit of monetary transactions. Therefore, these data can be aligned and linked with the transactions in a company’s financial statement. By doing that, the life cycle emissions of a company’s activities during one year can be calculated. The alignment and linking of data and the subsequent data manipulation requires a minimum of efforts. The main steps in the procedure is to categorise the purchase categories in the financial statement with the categories in the IO-database, convert uses from purchaser’s prices to basic prices, adjust for the currency year, and adding the emissions taking place within the company. Subsequent, additional life cycle stages can be included, e.g. the use and disposal stage. In order to increase relevance and to identify reduction potentials, the modelling of processes which are identified as environmental hotspots can be further modelled in detail using traditional bottom-up approaches.
The two main advantages of the IO-approach to sustainability reports are: 1) a minimum of data collection efforts are needed because all data (financial statement) are already in house, and 2) since IO-data by definition represent complete data, there is no need to create more or less arbitrary cut-off rules; results are simply 100% complete as default. Thus, based on a few days of workload a complete life cycle sustainability report can be carried out. Of course it may be relatively aggregated, and some improvement potentials may not be visible. The aggregated sustainability report is an optimal starting point for the more detailed investigation, and no time is lost because of time consuming data collection and modelling of insignificant processes.
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The impacts of regional production and consumption activity on pollution generation: developing a user-friendly carbon counting tool
Janine De Fence (University of Strathclyde), Max Munday (University of Cardiff) and Karen Turner (University of Stirling)
E-mail: karen.turner@stir.ac.uk
In 2008, the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded six Climate Change Leadership Fellowships. One of these has focussed on this issue of investigating the pollution content of trade flows in addressing the problem of climate change. One element of this research has been to identify appropriate accounting frameworks to quantify emissions under what Munksgaard and Pedersen (2001) term the ‘production accounting principle’ (emissions produced within the geographical boundaries of the regional/national economy – e.g. as considered under Kyoto Protocol agreements) and the ‘consumption accounting principle’ (emissions produced globally to meet consumption demand within the regional/national economy – e.g. as considered under environmental ‘footprints’). We have adopted input-output (IO) methodology that has become the accepted approach in the academic literature (see Wiedmann et al, 2007, and Wiedmann, 2009, for reviews).
However, we have concentrated on developing an approach that considers the pollution content of uni-directional trade flows using currently available IO data for the UK national and regional economies. This focus is partly motivated by the availability of reliable data, but also by the need to build up in stages what are quite complex accounting frameworks (which allow users to consider responsibility for pollution generation under a range of different perspectives/philosophies, taking into account issues of jurisdictional authority etc) in a transparent manner that can be more easily communicated to and understood by a wide variety of user groups. Here, we illustrate the potential usefulness of this tool for the case study of carbon counting in the Welsh economy.
Presentation abstracts, session 2:
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GREEN or GREY? How can delimitation of system boundary lead to misleading results? A case study from biomass power production
Trakarn Prapaspongsa*, Lone Kørnøv, Jannick Højrup Schmidt, Danish Centre for Environmental Assessment, Aalborg University
The study presents the use of life cycle assessment considering cause-effect relationships to identify how the impacts on ecosystems, human health, and resources can be misinterpreted by application of various system boundaries with focus only on carbon calculations. Different biomass power production schemes in Denmark using wood pellets, wood chips and straw from local and imported sources (Brazil, Chile, Baltic States, Canada, and Russian Federation) are considered in this case study. The assessment reveals significant contributions on global warming potentials from indirect land use change (0.04-1.7 kg CO2-eq. per kWh of electricity production from power production using wood pellets/chips while coal combustion scenario contributes 0.9 kg CO2-eq. per kWh of electricity production). The exclusion of indirect land use change results in wrong conclusions. The investigation further shows that the focus only on “carbon” in biomass power production lead to adverse impacts on human health (respiratory effects, human toxicity), biodiversity (from nature occupation and photochemical ozone) and society (from socio-economic impacts).
* Corresponding author, email: Trakarn@plan.aau.dk
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Energy efficiency and rebound effects – an example of the ‘law of unintended consequences’
Karen Turner, University of Stirling
E-mail: karen.turner@stir.ac.uk
Increased energy efficiency is commonly taken to be a ‘magic bullet’ in reducing energy use (and consequently greenhouse gas emissions). However, the notion of ‘rebound effects’ has raised questions as to the extent to which energy efficiency will actually reduce the demand for energy. Rebound effects occur because of the impact of improvements in energy efficiency on energy prices and also on income levels. In order to assess the likelihood and importance of a phenomenon such as rebound (and other potential unanticipated impacts of different types of actions aimed at improving environmental quality), a model is required that captures the complex network of interdependencies throughout the whole economy.
The objective of the research reported in this presentation been to develop such a model to examine ‘rebound’ effects in the UK economy. This has involved developing computable general equilibrium (CGE) models of the UK national and regional economies.
Some key results/research findings are as follows:
- Rebound effects will be more important where efficiency increases occur (a) in more energy-intensive activities, such as energy supply sectors and/or (b) in sectors that are heavily traded.
- Where energy efficiency improvements take place in the household sector, the income effects that drive rebound tend to be stronger in low income households. However, this result is sensitive to whether there is habitual behaviour in household energy use, and on the specific nature of such behavior.