Low carbon strategies need to tackle the carbon footprint of materials production
Résumé
Like Net-Zero GHG emissions
(NZE) country goals which have
recently multiplied, national low
carbon strategies currently
focus on reducing direct
territorial emissions across
sectors, such as domestic
energy, transport, buildings and
industry sectors. Doing so they
do not tackle emissions
embodied in imports and
insufficiently emissions related
to base carbon-intensive
materials production which are
used across sectors including for
capital formation. However the
carbon footprint of materials
production (CFM) represents a
high share of global emissions
and is mostly embodied in
imports in many rich countries.
Here we develop a novel
framework to assess and map
the carbon footprint of materials
at the country level in the
present situation and in future
scenarios. Replicable for other
countries, our framework is
applied to the case of France.
We find that although territorial
emissions from materials supply
only stand for 53 MtCO2eq in
2015, the CFM amounts to 228
MtCO2eq, i.e. 3.4 tCO2e/cap with
a high share of imported
emissions. Furthermore, we show
that current NZE strategy only
reduces the carbon footprint by
46% by 2050 compared to 2015
as it barely abates the CFM. All
final goods and services
contribute meaningfully to the
current and future CFM, in
particular final services. Mapping
the French CFM across supply
chains and trade flows allows to
identify key policy interventions
towards more sustainable NZE
strategies
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