Klimatpåverkan från privat och offentlig konsumtion i Kungsbacka kommun

Sammanfattning: In recent years, it has become increasingly recognized that the traditional production-based methods for calculations of greenhouse gas emissions have shortcomings. This is justified by the fact that such inventories only include emissions that occur within a particular geographical area. As major emissions also arise as a result of imports of goods and services and from international travel, such methods generates a misleading interpretation of reality. Further, the fact that the responsibility for emissions is exclusively assigned to the producer also results in consumers having no incentive to reduce their consumption. There is thus a need to include consumption-based emissions to the national inventories. This study is carried out in cooperation with the municipality of Kungsbacka, Sweden. The study aims at developing, testing and evaluate models for calculation of consumer-based greenhouse gas emissions on a local level. The models are mainly based on the methodology of environmentally-extended input-output analysis and they are designed to allow inventory and quantification of the emissions that a defined individual generates annually. The consumption-based greenhouse gas emissions from the average citizen in Kungsbacka municipality are showed to generally be larger than the average Swede’s. According to the results, this is mainly due to the high income levels in the municipality. Furthermore, the assessment of the applied models indicates that they can be used by municipalities to identify and prioritize actions, design interim goals and communicate with citizens and politicians. However, to take into consideration is that the models only generate very rough estimates of reality, as an effect of insufficient data availability. This highlights the need for national and local actors to take action in order to ensure that consumption-related data is collected on a regular basis. For future studies, it would thus be interesting to further investigate how such data collection could be organized