Fostering federal climate policies via regionalized carbon footprints and scenarios using Input-Output Laboratories

The overarching goal of the RegIOLab project is to support Austrian policy makers in developing effective place-sensitive supply- and demand-side climate change mitigation measures for all Austrian federal states. Currently there is a debate ongoing how to downscale the Austrian national GHG budget to the federal states level. For this, a contrasting of production- with consumption-based emissions accounts can identify carbon leakage and the underlying economic drivers, thereby contributing to the design of mitigation measures tailored to highly heterogenous Austrian federal states. The RegIOLab project will create the first openly available environmentally-extended global-to-local-scale multi-regional input-output (MRIO) model customized for Austria and its nine federal states in a time series from 2010 to 2022, with high sectoral disaggregation and global coverage. The newly developed MRIO for Austria will be used to analyse regional carbon footprints to uncover hotspots of carbon leakage on the sectoral federal state level and identify the underlying consumption drivers, which forms the basis for designing place-specific mitigation measures. RegIOLab reveals the concrete potentials of consumption-based approaches for GHG emission reductions and the significance of subnational trade interlinkages and the indirect GHG emissions, which are embodied in intra- and inter-national trade. These insights will help federal state authorities to negotiate GHG budgets and to plan their reduction measures based on novel and robust empirical data and thus with higher certainty. Moreover, RegIOLab will – together with federal stakeholders – design different climate change mitigation scenarios to assess the effects of mitigation policies on federal GHG emissions and carbon footprints as well as employment and value-added creation. This multi-indicator scenario assessment will provide novel insights on how national mitigation efforts affect federal states differently.