Carbon footprint

Measuring the material footprint of an economy is not enough to fully gauge its environmental impact. While the material footprint gives insight into the impact of material consumption at home and abroad, assessing a country’s carbon footprint is equally essential.

Consumption-based carbon footprinting can be used to measure the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions generated by the consumption of goods and services in a system. By accounting for emissions embodied in imports and exports, it represents the emissions of the goods and services consumed by the residents of a locality, regardless of where those emissions occur. In other words, it can provide a more accurate picture of a system’s contribution to global emissions, compared to production-based accounting.

Carbon footprint by country of origin refers to the country in which GHGs are emitted before the good responsible is exported to the country of consumption. For example, if manufacturing processing emitting greenhouse gases take place in China and then Oman imports the resulting products, then the country of origin of this share of the carbon footprint is China.