Environmental Impacts of the French Final Consumption

In order to fight against climate change, ambitious targets have been set, such as decreasing carbon emissions by 75% in France compared to 1990. Yet, focusing on territorial impacts leads to overlook import-embedded impacts. As a matter of fact, French territorial greenhouse gases (henceforth GHG) emissions have slightly decreased since 1990, whereas consumption-based emissions have been shown to increase. This is why we focus in this paper on consumption-based emissions rather than territorial emissions. Moreover, other environmental impacts are taken into account: air acidification (ACD), photochemical oxidation(PCO) and non-dangerous industrial wastes (NDIW). The contribution of the research presented in this paper is three-fold: first, the quantification of import-embedded impacts of consumption-based emissions is more accurate than previous studies; secondly, we build a scenario of French households final consumption in 2030 aiming at decreasing its environmental impacts; finally, a deep matrix algebra analysis gives us precious hints on the reliability of the results.