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West outsourcing emissions: Study by GS Mudur

Industrialised countries are increasingly outsourcing part of their emissions of greenhouse gases to emerging economies such as China and India through global trade, a new study has revealed.

The study by an international team of scientists has also shown that greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere have rocketed to unprecedented levels despite the global financial crisis (GFC) two years ago.

Although the GFC did lead to a temporary dip in emissions from the industrialised countries during 2008 and 2009, emissions from developing countries continued to increase. The total emissions from fossil fuel combustion, cement production, and deforestation touched 10 billion tons of carbon in 2010, according to the study to appear on Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

The findings emerge at a time when representatives of more than 190 countries are meeting in Durban, South Africa, to seek strategies to curb emissions and mitigate the consequences of global warming.

The new study has shown that emissions relating to goods and services produced in the emerging economies but consumed in the West have increased from 2.5 per cent of the share of rich countries' emissions in 1990 to 16 per cent in 2010.

“The emissions from some rich countries are declining, but we also see shifts in their consumption-related emissions to the developing countries,” said Corinne Le Quere, a member of the team and director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia, UK.

“The rich countries have to take some responsibility for clothes, furniture, or other products or services produced in countries such as China or India, but consumed in the rich countries,” Le Quere told The Telegraph over the telephone.

“But it might be difficult to account such emissions,” she said.

The study by Le Quere and her colleagues has shown that emissions have grown at a rate of 3.1 per cent per year since 2000. The researchers say this is a disturbing trend that will not allow the world to cap the increase in average global temperature at 2 degrees C, a critical limit that many researchers believe will be necessary to avoid catastrophic impacts of global warming.

Scientists believe the new findings underline the need for the world to find ways to delink economic growth from emissions — not merely by expanding renewable energy and improving energy efficiency, but through even bigger challenges.

“We’ll need alternative lifestyles — new ways of construction and new transportation, perhaps airships,” said Ashok Khosla, chairman of Development Alternatives, a New Delhi-based organisation promoting sustainable development since the late-1980s.

Khosla said the outsourcing of emissions appears to be part of trends through which developing countries experience the environmental costs of products consumed in the industrialised countries. Forests may be cleared or soil nutrients may be used up in South America to supply livestock meat that goes into hamburgers in North America, Khosla told The Telegraph.

Scientists believe the rebound of the emissions in 2010 to exactly the same level they would have been without the GFC is surprising given trends observed after tumultous financial events in the past.

"The oil crisis in the early 1970s had led to changes in the type of energy used — a shift from oil towards natural gas — while the collapse of the former Soviet Union had led to a decrease in total energy use," Le Quere said.

"This financial crisis has not left any traces in fossil fuel emissions," she said.

Many believe the GFC should have been an opportunity for countries to invest in low-carbon infrastructure, but emissions have risen to unprecedented levels. "These findings are truly shocking -- a global wake-up call," Julia Steinberger, an economist at the University of Leeds in the UK said in a statement on the study.

Even the limp economic recovery of 2010 has put the world back on a "high emissions trajectory," said David Reay, senior lecturer in carbon management at the University of Edinburgh, in an independent statement on the findings.

"For those striving for a breakthrough at the climate change conference in Durban," Reay said, "things just got even harder."