The energy and environmental impacts of Italian households consumptions: An input-output approach

Promoting sustainable consumption and production patterns is a key challenge for the future, in order to use the Earth resources efficiently, to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions, and to decouple the economic growth from the environmental degradation. New or customized methods have to be applied to support decisions makers in the choice of environmental-friendly products, and to select policy priorities and sustainable strategies. A modified input-output model can aid to analyse the relationships among economic growth, energy consumptions and pollutants, in order to assess the energy and environmental impacts due to the actual production and consumption patterns. The following paper introduces an energy and environmental extended input-output model and combines it with the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology. The authors apply this model to the Italian context in order to assess the energy and environmental impacts related to the consumptions of the Italian households in the period 1999-2006 and to identify the economic sectors involving the highest impacts. The paper represents one of the first Italian studies aimed at identifying those national economic sectors and final goods and services to be assumed prior in the definition of sustainable production and consumption strategies. Results show that about the 70% of the total energy, needed to meet the household final demand of products, is consumed by the productive sectors. In particular tertiary, "electricity, gas and vapour", road transports and "food and beverage" sectors are the roost contributors, accounting for about 75%. Further, the environmental impact analysis associated to Italian households consumptions is carried out, starting from three different data sources The results point out that, to include emissions arising both from energy and non-energy sources, in the assessment of environmental impacts is of paramount importance to obtain reliable simulations of the link between households consumptions and energy and environmental performances. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.