Environmentally-Extended Input-Output analyses efficiently sketch large-scale environmental transition plans -- illustration by Canada's road industry

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how Environmentally-Extended Input-Output (EEIO) analysis can efficiently support large-scale environmental transition planning, exemplified by Canada's road industry, by providing comprehensive ecological impact assessments and identifying key levers for sustainability improvements.

Contribution

It introduces a new Canadian EEIO database and applies EEIO analysis to identify environmental impacts and transition opportunities in Canada's road sector, highlighting impacts often overlooked by traditional LCA.

Findings

Road industry has a limited direct impact but significant indirect impacts from material purchases.

Major environmental issues include concrete and asphalt production, and energy use in machinery.

Most of the carbon footprint stems from road usage, not construction or maintenance.

Abstract

Industries struggle to build robust environmental transition plans as they lack the tools to quantify their ecological responsibility over their value chain. Companies mostly turn to sole greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reporting or time-intensive Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), while Environmentally-Extended Input-Output (EEIO) analysis is more efficient on a wider scale. We illustrate EEIO analysis usefulness to sketch transition plans on the example of Canada s road industry - estimation of national environmental contributions, most important environmental issues, main potential transition levers of the sector, and metrics prioritization for green purchase plans). To do so, openIO-Canada, a new Canadian EEIO database, coupled with IMPACT World plus v1.30-1.48 characterization method, provides a multicriteria environmental diagnosis of Canada s economy. The road industry generates a limited impact (0.5-1.8 percent) but must reduce the environmental burden from material purchases - mainly concrete and asphalt products - through green purchase plans and eco-design and invest in new machinery powered with cleaner energies such as low-carbon electricity or bioenergies. EEIO analysis also captures impacts often neglected in process-based pavement LCAs - amortization of capital goods, staff consumptions, and services - and shows some substantial impacts advocating for enlarging system boundaries in standard LCA. Yet, pavement construction and maintenance only explain 5 percent of the life cycle carbon footprint of Canada s road network, against 95 percent for the roads usage. Thereby, a carbon-neutral pathway for the road industry must first focus on reducing vehicle consumption and wear through better design and maintenance of roads (...)