The environmental impact of the Dutch health-care sector beyond climate change: an input-output analysis.

Background: Studies suggest that the Dutch health-care sector is responsible for 4-8% of the national carbon footprint, but the environmental footprint of this sector beyond climate change is not well understood. Therefore, we aimed to estimate the environmental footprint of the Dutch health-care sector for a range of environmental impact categories.

Methods: In this input-output analysis, we used Exiobase (version 3), which contains data on global trade flows and their associated environmental impact, in combination with health-care expenditure data from Statistics Netherlands.

A global overview of developments of urban and rural household GHG footprints from 2005 to 2015.

Household greenhouse-gas footprints (HGFs) are an important source of global emissions but can vary widely between urban and rural areas. These differences are important during the ongoing rapid, global, urbanization process. We provide a global overview of HGFs considering this urban-rural divide.

Variation in trends of consumption based carbon accounts.

The UNFCCC requires the annual reporting of greenhouse gas emissions. These inventories focus on emissions within a territory, and do not capture the effect of emissions embodied in imports. Consumption based carbon accounting (CBCA) has been proposed as a complementary method to capture these emissions, and a number of global models have been developed to operationalise CBCA.

Environmental responsibility for sulfur dioxide emissions and associated biodiversity loss across Chinese provinces.

Recent years have witnessed a growing volume in Chinese interregional trade, along with the increasing disparities in environmental pressures. This has prompted an increased attention on where the responsibilities for environmental impacts should be placed. In this paper, we quantify the environmental responsibility of SO emissions and biodiversity impacts due to terrestrial acidification at the provincial level for the first time.

The Reconciliation of Multiple Conflicting Estimates: Entropy-Based and Axiomatic Approaches.

When working with economic accounts it may occur that multiple estimates of a single datum exist, with different degrees of uncertainty or data quality. This paper addresses the problem of defining a method that can reconcile conflicting estimates, given best guess and uncertainty values. We proceeded from first principles, using two different routes.

Uncertainty of Consumption-Based Carbon Accounts.

Consumption-based carbon accounts (CBCAs) track how final demand in a region causes carbon emissions elsewhere due to supply chains in the global economic network, taking into account international trade. Despite the importance of CBCAs as an approach for understanding and quantifying responsibilities in climate mitigation efforts, very little is known of their uncertainties. Here we use five global multiregional input-output (MRIO) databases to empirically calibrate a stochastic multivariate model of the global economy and its GHG emissions in order to identify the main drivers of uncertainty in global CBCAs.

Evaluating the environmental impacts of dietary recommendations.

Dietary choices drive both health and environmental outcomes. Information on diets come from many sources, with nationally recommended diets (NRDs) by governmental or similar advisory bodies the most authoritative. Little or no attention is placed on the environmental impacts within NRDs.