Methane emissions of major economies in 2014: A household-consumption-based perspective

With the expansion of economic globalization and the growth of international trade, the pulling effect of household consumption to global anthropogenic CH₄ emissions related to production activities is becoming increasingly evident. This paper adopts a new perspective from the household-consumption side to investigate the CH₄ emissions of major economies in 2014 and compares it with the scenario under the final-demand-based perspective by combing the world input-output database and the latest emission data from the UNFCCC and EDGAR v5.0 database. Budgets of CH₄ emissions for 43 economies are established and trade connections & balances among major economies are explored. Results show that consumption-driven economies are allocated more CH₄ emissions in the household-consumption-based accounting (HCBA) framework compared to the final-demand-based accounting (FDBA) framework. The total trade-related transfer of CH₄ emissions is shown to sum up to 19% and 27% of the global total under the HCBA and FDBA frameworks, respectively. The household-consumption-based CH₄ emissions of China, India, Indonesia and Mexico are much lower than their final-demand-based CH₄ emissions, while the converse is true for the United States, Russia, Japan, the United Kingdom and Germany. The new accounting framework provides a new view to understand trade-related CH₄ emissions of major economies and to identify the role of household consumption in global supply chains, offering important implications for greenhouse gas emission mitigation.