Municipal consumption-based inventories of GHG emissions

Many Nordic municipalities have set ambitious goals for the reduction of greenhouse gases and strive to reach climate-neutrality in the coming decades. The targets, and consequently the tracking of emission reductions, have so far mainly been based on a territorial or area-based approach, which documents where greenhouse gases are emitted, as in the standard country-wide emission inventories reported to the UNFCCC. This approach is a cornerstone in global climate policy, but it is also relevant to track emissions according to the location of the consumption of goods and services that drive the emissions. The consumption-based approaches strive to capture emissions that are imported and embodied in the consumption.

Consumption-based inventories show that the consumption of goods and services in the Nordic countries generates significant emission outside the national borders. These embodied emissions are caused by fossil fuel-based energy sources along the supply chains and by other GHGs emitted from especially the food production sector. In the Nordic countries the share of imported embodied CO₂ emissions in final consumption varied from nearly 60 % for Iceland to 45 % for Finland in 2015. The variation is explained by differences in, for example, industrial structure. At the level of municipalities, the share of embodied emissions may differ from the national average, for example, due to differences in the use of energy and the production of goods within the municipal borders.

Nordic municipalities can have a key role in mitigating consumption-based GHG emissions by introducing measures to reduce emissions from their own (in-house) consumption. They may also facilitate more responsible consumption patterns in the whole municipality as a society including all actors. Consumption-based emission inventories support this work. One key challenge for detailed inventories is to collect data and estimate impacts from local consumption throughout the value chains. The Greenhouse Gas Protocol for cities (GPC) provides a good starting point but does currently not provide detailed guidance for comprehensive consumption-based assessments. As the same challenges are encountered by municipalities in all Nordic countries and beyond, a transnational exchange of experiences is highly beneficial to accelerate climate policy learning.