Page 33 - Research on Financial Development Mechanism and Path of Forestry Carbon Sequestration in Developing Countries under Double Carbon Targets

Chapter 1 Carbon Asset Management Practice

carbon footprint services such as carbon border taxes, carbon offsets or low-carbon
consumer guide will be closely linked with currency transactions in the future. There-
fore, it is essential to define a scientific and comprehensive concept of carbon footprint
with international recognition. The concept of carbon footprint of industrial products: “in
the time dimension, the total accumulated carbon emissions of greenhouse gases from
cradle to grave are accounted for from the perspective of the whole life cycle, and on
this basis, the direct and indirect carbon emissions of each part in the’ whole process’
are accounted for in the technical dimension, so as to achieve a relatively comprehen-
sive multi-dimensional and multi-scale carbon footprint accounting assessment”
2) Carbon footprint assessment method
From a methodological point of view, there are mainly three different methods for
the quantification and assessment of carbon footprint: one is the “bottom-up” calcu-
lation method represented by life cycle analysis (LCA), the other is the “top-down”
calculation method represented by input-output analysis (IOA). Combining the two
methods, a third method, Hybrid LCA, can be derived.
The LCA carbon footprint assessment method examines the “cradle-to-grave” car-
bon emissions from products or services in the areas of raw material extraction, pro-
duction and processing, storage and transportation, use, and waste disposal. The meth-
od is suitable for carbon footprint assessment of micro-objects, such as water supply
facilities, community towns, industrial products, agricultural and sideline products, etc.
The calculation process of LCA method is detailed and accurate, but it needs a large
amount of high-precision data support, and is vulnerable to the influence of boundary
restrictions and life cycle determination, especially the truncation error generated in the
process of delimiting the system boundary is difficult to eliminate completely, which
results in certain uncertainty in the evaluation results.
IOA carbon footprint assessment method is based on the input-output table to build
a calculation model, so as to account for the carbon emissions caused by different re-
gions and different departments to meet their own final consumption. The method can
quantitatively describe the input-output relationship among various departments with-
in the economic system, and is more suitable for the analysis of medium and macro
systems. For example, Dong Huijuan and others have studied the carbon footprint of
Beijing residents’ consumption based on input-output analysis; Hasegawa et al. con-
structed a multi-region input-output table to analyze the carbon footprint of Japan’s
regional economic activities; Weber et al. used this method to calculate the carbon foot-
print of household consumption in the United States. The IOA-based carbon footprint

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