Variation in trends of consumption based carbon accounts

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change requires the annual reporting of greenhouse gas emissions. These reports focus on emissions within a territory, and do not capture the effect of de-carbonization in developed countries that has resulted simply by the relocation of emissions-intensive production to other countries. Consumption based carbon accounting has been proposed as a complementary method to capture the emissions occurring globally due to final consumption in a country. A number of global models have been developed in the last decade in order to operationalise consumption based accounting. However, the direct comparison of results from the models is hampered by differences in model construction. Here, we processed results of all the major global models in order to produce a unified and consistent global dataset over a long-time series. Indexing the annual changes to a base year, we also include an analyses of the variability across the models, both in absolute terms and in indexed terms in order to give an insight into robustness at both national and regional level.