EU exports environmental damage while keeping economic benefits, study finds

Name: Greta Thunberg all smiles as German police carry her away from protest
Uploaded: 2023-01-29T07:00:18.000Z
Duration: 2 min 8 s
Description: Greta Thunberg all smiles as German police carry her away from protest

European Union outsources greenhouse gas emissions, air and water pollution to eastern Europe, China and the rest of Asia, researchers say

Meanwhile, over 85 per cent of GDP linked to EU consumers stays within bloc

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According to climate change expert Yuli Shan, the EU should develop a carbon trading mechanism to compensate poor countries. Photo: AP

Ling Xinin Beijing

Published: 3:00pm, 29 Jan 2023

EU consumers have been exporting environmental damage to the rest of the world while keeping most of the economic benefits within the region, according to a new study by an international research team.

For more than two decades, the European Union outsourced greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution and toxins in water and soil to its eastern European neighbours, the Middle East, Brazil, China, India and Japan, said the paper published in Nature Sustainability on Thursday.

Meanwhile, over 85 per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP) linked to EU consumption stayed within member states.

“This is one example of how the world’s wealthiest economies, with really high consumption of food, clothing, manufactured products and services, are causing inequalities around the world,” said Yuli Shan, a climate change expert at the University of Birmingham in Britain and one of the paper’s lead authors.

The study was conducted by researchers from Europe, China and the United States. They used a global supply chain database known as EXIOBASE to examine consumption-related GDP growth in EU nations from 1995 to 2019 and compared it to the environmental effects during the same period.

“Besides widely used environmental indicators such as greenhouse gas emissions and water consumption, we also looked at ecotoxicity, particulate matter formation and a few other indicators which were key to reflecting local environmental damage where the production of consumer goods took place,” Shan said on Saturday.

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Greta Thunberg all smiles as German police carry her away from protest

The team found that the EU’s consumption patterns were much more beneficial to member states than to non-EU countries. From 1995 to 2019, environmental damage largely decreased within the EU but increased significantly outside the bloc.

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