Uneven transition risks from multi-scope carbon flows: a nationwide regional assessment for South Korea

Global climate regulations increasingly extend carbon responsibility beyond direct emitters to the supply chains that sustain regional economies. Yet little is known about how these disclosure regimes redistribute transition risks across regions within a country. This study provides the first nationwide, multi-scope assessment of South Korea's regional carbon flows by integrating production-based (Scope 1), energy-related (Scope 2) and supply chain embedded (Scope 3) emissions into a regionally extended input-output framework. We develop two indicators, carbon exposure and responsibility mismatch, to capture both the absolute scale of regional emissions and the structural gap between where emissions occur and where they are economically induced. The results reveal stark asymmetries. Industrial provinces such as Chungcheongnam-do and Jeollanam-do exhibit high exposure driven by energy and material intensive production, indicating strong vulnerability to carbon pricing and industrial decarbonization obligations. In contrast, metropolitan regions such as Seoul and Gyeonggi-do show low direct emissions but extremely high Scope 3 dependence, exposing them to disclosure driven risks as embodied emissions become increasingly visible. Cluster analysis identifies four transition risk archetypes, demonstrating that regional vulnerabilities stem not from emission magnitude alone but from structural positioning within national supply chains. These findings contribute to the literature by providing a regionally explicit, multi-scope framework for assessing transition risks, highlighting how structural positions within national supply chains shape regional vulnerability under expanding climate disclosure regimes.