Carbon footprint of Belgian regions [ Working Paper 01-23 - 17/01/2023]

In international agreements, countries are considered responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions linked to their production activities. The carbon footprint provides an alternative assessment of this responsibility by attributing emissions to the country where the goods and services are consumed. This study presents the production-based CO2 emissions and the carbon footprint of the three Belgian regions for the year 2015. The production-based CO2 emissions are derived from the regional air emission accounts developed for this study, while the regional carbon footprints are calculated based on an input-output model and input-output data that include CO2 emissions. According to the results, the carbon footprint exceeds production-based emissions for all three regions. This implies that their contribution to global CO2 emissions is larger from a consumption perspective than from a production perspective.