Green growth? A consumption perspective on Swedish environmental impact trends using input–output analysis

Abstract: Consumption-based environmental impact trends for the Swedish economy have been generated and analysed in order to determine their levels compared to official production-based data, and to determine whether or not the Swedish economy has decoupled growth in domestic final demand from worldwide environmental impact. Three energy resources (oil, coal and gas use, as well as their aggregate fossil fuel use) and seven emissions (CO2, CH4, N2O, SO2, NOx, CO and NMVOC, as well as the aggregate CO2 equivalents) were studied. An augmented single-regional input–output model has been deployed, with world average energy and emission intensities used for products produced abroad. A new method for updating input–output tables for years missing official input–output tables, was also developed. For each of the resources and the emissions, two time series were generated based on two different revisions of Swedish national accounts data, one for the period 1993–2003, the other for the period 2000–2005. The analysis uses a recently revised time series of environmental data from the Swedish environmental accounts, as well as recently published global environmental data from the IEA and from the EDGAR emissions database (all data from 2010 or later). An index decomposition analysis was also performed to detect the various components of the time series. For fossil fuels consumption-based data don't differ much from production-based data in total. For the greenhouse gases there is a clear increase (CO2eq emissions increase approximately 20 % from 1993–2005, mainly driven by an increase in CH4 emissions), resulting from increased emissions abroad due to the increased demand for imported products. This suggests Sweden has not decoupled economic growth from increasing greenhouse gas emissions – contrary to what the slightly decreasing official production-based UNFCCC data say. For the precursor gases (SO2, NOx, CO and NMVOC), emissions are generally decreasing, with the exception of SO2 and NOx which increase in the second time series. For all emissions studied, consumption-based data lie at much higher levels than the official production-based UNFCCC data. However, further research is needed regarding the resolution of the data of the energy use and the emissions generated abroad by the Swedish domestic final demand. Also, extension of the time series and of the environmental parameters to such things as material use is needed to find out with more certainty to what extent Swedish growth has been sustainable or not.