The Climate Impact of UK plc

A new climate change report by Christian Aid titled Coming Clean, as it pushes the issue to the very top of its campaigning priorities, focuses on the big picture of the UK's carbon emissions and targeting Tony Blair's oft-repeated assertion that the UK can only do so much on unilateral climate change action because it is only responsible for 2% of global carbon dioxide emissions.

To begin with one point - 2% of a global total may not seem like much, but is near the top of the per-capita rankings and is still the seventh-largest overall emitter. What the report focuses on is how UK-headquarted multinational companies are responsible for generating a much greater proportion of carbon emissions through their international activities. The estimate provided by the report and the Trucost environmental analyst consultancy, comes to 15% of the global total.

Current emissions from FTSE companies are only voluntarily reported (at varying levels of complexity), and these generally only include the basics - from offices and personnel travel. What is glaringly missing is tracing the impact of the activities themselves. So banks like Barclays and HSBC (my own bank, admittedly), through lending and support for new fossil fuel projects, find their activities to be extremely 'carbon-intensive. Tesco and the supermarkets' global supply chain carbon impacts are not fully reflected in their reported figures, and well, I think you can guess that the oil and gas industries fall in the same bracket too.

What the report calls for is for government to introduce a mandatory reporting requirement for all UK-based companies, and for a transparent, benchmarked standard to allow for comparisons across companies. With apropriate data, measures can then be taken to reduce the carbon burden of UK plc.

Just as carbon emissions know no boundaries in effecting change elsewhere in the world, we should not be straightjacketed by national boundaries in considering the sources of international emissions. Have the high-emitting industries simply been outsourced to other countries, helping to lower the UK's emissions? This reflects, in the report's terms, the 'carbon cost of globalisation'.