Disparate Geography of Consumption, Production, and Environmental Impacts

Abstract

Summary International trade transfers social and environmental impacts across national borders. The consumption of forest products often takes place far away from industrial production sites, and mills procure raw material from remote forests. Finland produces about 10% of forest products that are traded internationally, with the majority of its exports destined for other European countries. Here we report and analyze data that demonstrate that international leakage, in relative terms, increased faster than the production of commodities. The international consumption of products made in Finland increased, and an increase in wood imports from Russia provided the raw material for most of the incremental production. The international consumption‐production system translated the increasing global demand for Finnish products into increased harvests in Russia, until the Russian customs duties started to increase in 2007. We argue that national and regional policies for the promotion of sustainable consumption and production must be analyzed and assessed from an international, holistic perspective.

Deforestation beyond borders: Addressing the disparity between production and consumption of global resources

“…; Ståhls et al . ). Economic measures imposed at the national level (e.g., Pigouvian taxes) can assist in addressing externalities, but fail to achieve increased cognizance of ecological limitations or address the distributive justice problem that arises when resources are channeled from poor nations to rich ones.…”

“…National forest policies fall short, in part, because current trade regimes enable countries to export environmental damage to places outside their borders, and to export with it any awareness of, or responsibility for, the damages incurred (Dekker-Robertson & Libby 1998;Muradian & Martinez-Alier 2001;Berlik et al 2002;Mayer et al 2005;Ståhls et al 2010). Economic measures imposed at the national level (e.g., Pigouvian taxes) can assist in addressing externalities, but fail to achieve increased cognizance of ecological limitations or address the distributive justice problem that arises when resources are channeled from poor nations to rich ones.…”

Mechanism, risk, and solution of cultivated land reversion to mountains and abandonment in China

“…A recent review 276 households on the Loess Plateau Frontiers in Environmental Science frontiersin.org found that farmers are unwilling to cultivate steep slopes or to employ recultivation on restored land due to the greater distance costs and lower grain yields when vegetation restoration programs don't affect grain self-sufficiency (Wu et al, 2021). While compared to arable land, forest land provides mainly ecological but not economic functions for humans due to China's forest protection policies (Mayer et al, 2005;Stahls et al, 2010). The provision of the ecological function, however, is independent of the transportation cost and is realized via telecoupling (Li et al, 2023).…”

Beyond biofuels: Assessing global land use for domestic consumption of biomass

“…From 1991 to 2005, Finland has increased timber imports from Russiadue to lower prices -while using only about two thirds of domestic annual forest growth. In Northwest Russia clear cut logging tended to change soft woods into birch forests (Stahls et al, 2010). This eventually leads to the question of what a sustainable level of forest use in various world regions, as well as globally, looks like.…”