Evaluation of Environmental Accounting Methodologies for the assessment of global environmental impacts of traded goods and services.

Isabelle Blanc (1) , Damien Friot (1)

1 CEP/Sophia

Environmental accounting methods (EAM) are currently getting a strong interest from political entities, multinational corporations and citizens. EAMs are applied to a large range of socio-techno-economic activities for monitoring and managing their environmental performance over time: at macro-level to implement the environmental pillar of sustainable development, at meso-level for companies reporting and at micro-level for comparing the environmental footprints of products. IMEA project (IMports Environmental Accounting) is a SKEP-Era-net project (Scientific Knowledge for Environmental Protection) aiming at assessing the potential of EAMs to consider the challenges from globalization and environmental impacts linked to international trade. It was lead by MINES ParisTech/ARMINES with partners from the Institute of Social Ecology, Vienna, TNO, University of Oulu, and VITO, carried out between June 2008 and September 2009. The global aim of IMEA is to provide elements to answer the following question: "Does a given EAM meet societal expectations and how does it cope with new challenges from globalization?". IMEA has focused on the analysis of these challenges based on what EAMs "are", "how" they function and the use of their results in decision-making by the means of an archetypical workflow and an analytical framework. Based on this comprehensive analytical framework, the following EAMs. have been assessed in detail: Life Cycle Assessment, Economy-Wide Material Flow Analysis, Physical Input Output Tables, Environmentally Extended Input-Output Analysis, land use indicators like the Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production, the Actual Land Demand or the Ecological Footprint, and the Water Footprint.

Domaines: Sciences de l'environnement

Isabelle Blanc, Damien Friot. Evaluation of Environmental Accounting Methodologies for the assessment of global environmental impacts of traded goods and services.. [Research Report] Mines ParisTech. 2010. ⟨hal-00740712⟩