Resources for a sustainable future

3/2/2010 New Scientist Magazine issue 2746. The UK government is sitting on a report that shows its emissions rose by 13.5 per cent between 1992 and 2004. It previously claimed they fell by 4.6 per cent over the same period.The discrepancy appears when emissions from goods that are made abroad and imported into the UK are included. “We seem to emit less because we don’t produce much here any more,” says Giovanni Baiocchi, an economist at Durham University, UK. “But more emissions are released now in other countries because of our consumer demands.”

Baiocchi and his team were asked by the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) to carry out an audit of the nation’s emissions. They found that efforts to decrease national CO2 emissions, mainly by shifting from coal to natural-gas power plants, cut 148 megatonnes between 1992 and 2004. But this was outweighed by a 217-megatonne rise in CO2 emissions from imported goods.

“This undermines the whole Kyoto process,” says Glen Peters of Norway’s Center for International Climate and Environment Research. Under the Kyoto protocol, developed nations are only required to cut emissions produced within their own borders. “The UK can pat itself on the back and say they reduced carbon dioxide emissions, but they just pushed those emissions elsewhere.”

DEFRA has not yet published the report, whose results now appear in Environmental Science & Technology (DOI: 10.1021/es902662h). “[It] was finished six months ago,” says Peters, who reviewed the study for DEFRA. “It could be a slow bureaucratic process or it could be that they are worried about the impact of the results.”

“Unfortunately it has taken longer than anticipated to publish the report due to the technical nature and terminology used in initial drafts,” DEFRA told New Scientist. DEFRA aims to publish the report later this year.

Go to: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527463.800-imports-mean-uk-emissions-are-up-not-down.html