Local consumption and territorial based accounting for CO2 emissions

•CO2 emissions are attributed to a city and city-region within a regional economy.•Trade and consumption drive city-region emissions interdependencies.•City region runs an emission deficit with host economy via electricity imports.•Territorial attribution suggests per FTE job is cleaner in the city.•Emissions intensities more homogenous under consumption attribution.

We examine the complications involved in attributing emissions at a local level. Specifically, we look at how functional specialisation within a city region can, via trade between sub-regions, create emissions interdependencies; and how this complicates environmental policy implementation in an analogous manner to international trade at the national level. For this purpose we use a 3-region emissions extended input-output model of the Glasgow City region (2 regions: city and wider city-region) and the rest of Scotland. The model utilises data on household consumption to account for consumption flows across sub-regions and plant-level data on emissions from electricity generation to augment the top-down disaggregation of emissions. This enables a carbon attribution at the sub-regional level, which is used to analyse emissions interdependencies within the city-region.