The importance of multiregional accounting for corporate carbon emissions

Abstract

Corporations routinely use environmentally-extended input-output models to estimate and report greenhouse gas emissions upstream in their supply chains. However, the most widely used models assume that supply chains and emissions intensities of industries match those of a single region—usually the U.S. or the U.K. Here, we use a high-resolution multiregional input-output model to demonstrate the scale and pattern of emissions that may be missed by single-region models. We find that the upstream emissions of the companies reporting to CDP are together greater by 2.0 gigatons of CO2-equivalent emissions (~10%) when estimated by a multiregional model instead of a U.S.-based single-region model, with the largest differences in manufacturing sectors of moderate emissions intensity. Widespread adoption of multiregional models could thus improve the accuracy of corporate emissions inventories and help prioritize primary data collection and emissions reduction efforts, often by shifting focus to energy- and emissions-intensive sectors of industrializing nations.