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Environmental and social footprints of international trade

Nature Geoscience volume 11, pages 314–321 (2018)Cite this article

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Abstract

Globalization has led to an increasing geospatial separation of production and consumption, and, as a consequence, to an unprecedented displacement of environmental and social impacts through international trade. A large proportion of total global impacts can be associated with trade, and the trend is rising. Advances in global multi-region input-output models have allowed researchers to draw detailed, international supply-chain connections between harmful production in social and environmental hotspots and affluent consumption in global centres of wealth. The general direction of impact displacement is from developed to developing countries—an increase of health impacts in China from air pollution linked to export production for the United States being one prominent example. The relocation of production across countries counteracts national mitigation policies and may negate ostensible achievements in decoupling impacts from economic growth. A comprehensive implementation of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals therefore requires the inclusion of footprint indicators to avoid loopholes in national sustainability assessments.

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Fig. 1: Burden shifting.
Fig. 2: Average physical distances of national footprints in kilometres in 2010.
Fig. 3: Semi-quantitative visualization of the identity and frequency of environmental and social indicators used in footprint or trade studies.
Fig. 4: Closeness of commonly used GMRIO matrices measured in unitless cross-entropy distances and depicted on a two-dimensional plane using multidimensional scaling.

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Acknowledgements

We thank J. Barrett, University of Leeds, for advice on the policy relevance of consumption-based accounting. Data, help and advice from S. Pfister, ETH Zurich, Switzerland, for preparing the footprint distances maps is greatly acknowledged.

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  1. Sustainability Assessment Program, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UNSW Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Thomas Wiedmann

  2. ISA, School of Physics A28, The University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Thomas Wiedmann & Manfred Lenzen

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T.W. and M.L. wrote the paper. T.W. analysed data to create Figs. 1–3.

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Wiedmann, T., Lenzen, M. Environmental and social footprints of international trade. Nature Geosci 11, 314–321 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-018-0113-9

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