Third-country carbon embedded in global trade

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Provides a novel methodology for attributing emissions to third countries in global supply chains, useful for refining trade-carbon accounting models.

🏢実務担当者:Highlights the need for companies to trace emissions beyond direct suppliers to capture full Scope 3 impacts, informing supply-chain decarbonization strategies.

🏛政策担当者:Informs carbon border policies and international climate agreements by demonstrating the significance of third-country emissions in trade.

<title>Abstract</title> <p>International trade records name an exporter and an importer, but the supply chains behind a traded product often draw on production in other countries. Here we quantify third-country carbon: CO₂ emissions generated outside both trade partners, but required by the supply chain that links them. Using the Eora multi-region input-output table, we trace these emissions for 189 economies, 26 sectors and 35,532 directed trade routes from 2000 to 2021. Third-country carbon reached 1.85 Gt CO₂ in 2021, or 27.7% of trade-embodied emissions. After rapid growth from 2000 to 2011, this third-country layer persisted at a high level. It is strongly directional, spread across many trade routes, concentrated in a few upstream production sources and rooted in energy and material sectors. Structural decomposition shows that improvements in carbon coefficients reduced third-country carbon by about 2.0 Gt CO₂ over 2000–2021, whereas trade expansion and production-network restructuring added about 1.85 Gt and 0.91 Gt. These findings shift trade-carbon accounting from endpoint responsibility towards path and source-based responsibility, with implications for carbon border policies, product disclosure and supply-chain decarbonisation.</p>

• Research Square https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-10440088/v1first seen 2026-08-04 04:33:33