Carbon and environmental footprint inequality of household consumption in the EU : a new methodology

Detailed information on the consumption footprint of households is essential for the distributional assessment of their carbon and other environmental impacts. The analysis and monitoring of footprint inequalities helps policymakers to formulate incentives for promoting sustainable lifestyles and consumption patterns, to strengthen consumer awareness and, in turn, to support the steering of our society towards greater environmental and economic sustainability. This report introduces a methodology for a novel dataset of the distribution of the consumption footprint of households as well as its inequality, allowing users to zoom in on geographical areas and socio-demographic characteristics. This dataset is based on granular micro-data on the footprint of the individual products consumed by each individual household. Its construction relies on the product-level matching of survey data on households' consumption expenditure with information on the related carbon and other environmental footprints. For the latter, we rely on the JRC Consumption Footprint which quantifies the environmental impacts resulting from the consumption patterns of individuals at both the EU and single country scale, accounting for both the impacts within the EU territory as well as the embedded impacts in international trade. This dataset uses the product-level environmental impact information from representative products in the areas of food, mobility, housing, household goods and appliances, which is based on process-based life cycle assessment (LCA) and has a high granularity level to allow for modelling policy scenarios. This report provides a description of the methodology for the development and of the potential use of the novel footprint inequality dataset. Starting from the data description, we outline the steps for matching different input datasets and the challenges involved in developing the data infrastructure. The compiled dataset has a good coverage of the consumption footprint at EU and Member State level and reveals large differences in the level and inequality of the consumption footprint across and within different countries in the EU.