Variation in trends of consumption based carbon accounts

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) requires the annual reporting of greenhouse gas emissions. These inventories 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 (CBCA) has been proposed as a complementary method to capture the emissions occurring globally due to final demand in a country. A number of global models have been developed in the last decade in order to operationalise CBCA. However, direct comparison of results from different models yields significant discrepancies in country-level CBCA, which causes concern for the practical use of CBCA. There is a body of existing work on model intercomparison and reliability, but this literature has largely overlooked a main use case of CBCA results: trends over time.  To facilitate temporal intercomparison, we present results of all the major global models and normalise the model results by looking at changes over time of each model relative to a common base year value.  We give an analysis of the variability across the models, both before and after normalisation in order to give insights into robustness (variance) at both national and regional level. The paper is accompanied by the dataset of CBCA results of each country/year with harmonised results (based on the means) and measures of dispersion, providing a useful and often requested baseline dataset for CBCA validation and analysis.