Scotland's Carbon Footprint 1998-2020

This year (2023) represents a major update in the method of removing tax from imported goods.  Additionally, the global warming potentials for non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions have been updated to IPCC AR5 (without climate feedback impacts) and is now consistent with the methods used in the territorial emissions statistics.

The improvement in the method for removing tax on imported goods is incorporated in this publication and corrects a previous overestimation of emissions associated with imports.  In previous versions of the method used to construct the UK MRIO database, the Analytical tables were used to calculate the proportion of Combined Use table that was domestic. Leeds University then used proportions to calculate the total imported use by industry as a row. For this release, Leeds University altered this methodology to ensure that the imports were the result of the total industrial output minus domestic use minus value added. This ensured that the column sums add up to the value for total industrial output in basic prices (excluding VAT and other product taxes/subsidies). The result of this change in the imports calculation is a reduction in the imported emissions reported in the consumption-based account. The actual difference in monetary terms between the imports row calculated in previous years and this year is relatively small, but the difference in emissions is exaggerated because the emissions intensity of imports is higher than the emissions intensity of domestic goods. The updated method has led, at the UK level, to good agreement with the most recently developed alternative MRIO databases (from the Global Carbon Atlas and OECD), especially in the period after 2007.

The impact of the change in global warming potentials is minor and does not impact results to a significant level.

Figure 9: The latest release is consistently lower than the previous year’s release, with the greatest difference being 31.1 per cent in 2001 and the smallest difference being 22.5 per cent in 2013

Scotland’s Carbon Footprint. Comparison of 1998-2019 and 1998-2020 series. Values in MtCO2e

Revisions between the 1990-2012 and 1990-2020 publications

Since the carbon footprint was first published, successive releases have used different versions of the UK MRIO model. The 2012 release used a 2-region model which only distinguished the UK and the Rest of the World as trade regions. The 2013, 2015 and 2016 releases used a four region model, distinguishing imports from Europe, China and the Rest of World, using trade data from the Eora global MRIO. The 2017, 2018 and 2019 model adopted the same four regions but used trade data from the EXIOBASE MRIO. In this release, the UK MRIO model uses a 15 region configuration although this has been collapsed to a degree in the publication for clarity. The full 15 region detail is provided in a spreadsheet which accompanies this publication.