Scottish Government

1 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1.1 This report presents time series of both ecological and greenhouse gas ( GHG¹) footprints, from 1992-2006 for Scotland. It measures the ecological (in terms of land use) and emission impacts of all consumption activities in Scotland. Indicators that adopt this approach demonstrate the resources required and emissions generated to meet domestic demand, wherever in the world production occurs. The ecological footprint acts as a wider indicator to frame the debate from a consumer perspective and includes the GHG footprint, which clearly has relevance to climate change mitigation policy in its own right.

1.2 As in most developed countries of the world, the ecological and GHG footprints of Scotland are greater than the land used or emissions generated within the country's boundary. Growing demand, most often satisfied by an increase in imports, means that footprints have been increasing, whilst domestic impacts have remained relatively stable, or decreased. The time series comparison of the GHG footprint and the GHG inventory (domestic emissions) clearly demonstrates this, with the former increasing since 1992 and the latter decreasing since 1990 (see Figure 14).

1.3 The ecological footprint of Scotland for 2006 is estimated to be 4.8 gha ²/capita. This exceeds the estimates of global bio-capacity available (2.1 gha/capita), which means that Scotland is proportionally consuming beyond the capacity of the earth's biosphere to provide services and to regenerate. If all people in the world consumed at similar levels to Scotland, we would need resources and carbon sinks that equated to more than double the resources of the Earth in order to service that demand.

1.4 The GHG footprint for Scotland stood at 16.6 tonnes CO ₂e/capita in 2006, compared to a world average of just over 6.4 tonnes CO ₂e/capita in 2005.

1.5 Figure 1 shows the change in ecological and GHG footprints from 1992-2006 for Scotland. Between 1992 and 2006, there was a 14% increase in the per capita ecological footprint and a 13% increase in the per capita GHG footprint. Changes between 1992 and 2006 in neither the ecological footprint nor the GHG footprint are significant at the 95% confidence level. The change in the GHG footprint is significant at the 80% confidence level.

1.6 The full report includes more detailed analyses of these results, separating the ecological footprint into land and fossil-fuel footprints, the main findings of which are as follows:

• The consumption category contributing most to the land footprint is food; for the fossil-fuel footprint it is transport and housing.
• The total indirect (supply chain) impacts generated by these consumption activities far exceed those direct impacts (direct fuel and land use).
• The indirect impacts have been steadily increasing since 1992, while direct impacts of consumption (fossil-fuel consumption for domestic heating and private transport) have remained fairly stable.

Figure 1 Per capita Ecological and Greenhouse Gas Footprint for Scotland, 1992-2006

1.7 A further component of the report is a summary of the footprint calculation methods used by different organisations. Annex A provides a full description of the methodology employed by SEI. The main conclusions from this work (and that of previous studies) is that methodologies based on trade volumes and life cycle analysis tend to underestimate the impact of services and the indirect impacts, and overestimate embodied energy impacts of raw materials. This is because they apply the same conversion factors to products regardless of their country of origin and only consider limited sections of supply chains, so the full impacts of more highly manufactured products can be underestimated.

1.8 The methodology employed by SEI (environmentally extended input-output analysis) calculates the embodied energy conversion factors inherently in the model and are therefore specific to the UK. The modelling framework also takes into account full supply chain impacts. However, due to data availability this method is not currently applied in all countries.