Tracking the environmental impacts embedded in commodity consumption

The dashboard was developed by the Stockholm Environment Institute (including the Sustainable Consumption Production group within the York Centre) and the Joint Nature Conservation Committee.

Dashboard development was supported by the UK Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra), the UK Research and Innovation’s Global Challenges Research Fund through the Trade, Development and the Environment Hub project (project ES/S008160/1), the Trase Project, and the Belgian Federal Public Service for Health, Food Chain Safety and Environment. Production of the underlying data set was commissioned and supported by Defra.

The data used in this dashboard are created within SEI’s Input-Output Trade Analysis (IOTA) framework, built around a hybridised physical-financial Multi-Region Input-Output (MRIO) model (Croft et al. 2018, 2021, 2023). In this application, IOTA utilises commodity level production and trade data along with monetary financial flows to provide estimates of the movement of goods from national-level points of production through to final consumption, regardless of supply chain length and complexity. These supply chains are extended via the application of environmental impact indicators, which in turn allow for the flows of embedded impacts to be captured.

The subsequent results allow for a range of perspectives to be assessed, compared and analysed, from the production or consumption end of the supply chain, across individual or multiple commodities, and over a range of metrics.

This dashboard uses a version of IOTA described in Croft et al. 2023. Other versions of IOTA include a more complex treatment of trade and processing information from FAO to provide more detailed assessment of trade-flow information as linked to consumption. This more complex version of IOTA underpins recent work to assess Belgium's deforestation footprint, summarised in this report. These methods differences mean that whilst results in the report are likely to be broadly similar, they should not be directly compared with data in this Dashboard.

You can download the full data set here (for EXIOBASE version) and here (for GTAP version).

Note that a similar but more comprehensive assessment of Belgium's deforestation and biodiversity exposure, based on more complex IOTA-model methods, is available via this project report. A further report that explored Belgium's water footprint is also available here.

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