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We now live in a 400 parts per million world. Data from the Mauna Loa observatory, Hawaii, suggests carbon dioxide concentration levels are unlikely to consistently fall back below this level in our lifetimes.
Carbon accounting is crucial to efforts to tackle climate change, providing data on where emissions emanate and where they are absorbed. Decision-makers rely on the best information about the earth’s changing sinks and sources as they seek to constrain global emissions.
This collection brings together a selection of multi-disciplinary research and commentary from across the physical and social sciences that explores the major inputs and outputs that comprise the world’s carbon account.
Tourism is a significant contributor to the global economy, with potentially large environmental impacts. Origin and destination accounting perspectives are used to provide a comprehensive assessment of global tourism’s carbon footprint.
Traditional carbon accounting attributes gap between consumption- and production-based emissions to international trade. The authors develop a dynamic model that incorporates capital stock change and find it improves estimates for fast-developing countries.
The Paris Agreement has increased the incentive to verify reported anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions with independent Earth system observations. Reliable verification requires a step change in our understanding of carbon cycle variability.
The decline in China’s CO2 emissions in the past few years is largely due to changes in industrial structure and a decline in the share of coal for energy production, according to a quantitative analysis of the drivers of CO2 emissions.
China has entered a new normal phase of economic development with a changing role in global trade. Here the authors show that emissions embodied in China’s exports declined from 2007 to 2012, while developing countries become the major destinations of China’s export emissions.
Fisheries generated a total of 179 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent GHG emissions in 2011 (4% of global food production). Emissions grew by 28% between 1990 and 2011, primarily driven by increased harvests from fuel-intensive crustacean fisheries.
Here emission curves are developed for advanced biofuel supply chains to enhance understanding of the relationship between biofuel supply and its potential contribution to climate change mitigation while accounting for landscape heterogeneity.
All energy generation technologies emit greenhouse gases during their life cycle as a result of construction and operation. Pehl et al. integrate life-cycle assessment and energy modelling to analyse the emissions contributions of different technologies across their lifespan in future low-carbon power systems.
Greenhouse gas emissions can be allocated to individual countries in various ways depending on where in the supply chain the emissions originated; achieving an effective and just climate policy may require multiple accounting systems.