the sw budget

 

a fair share of the global carbon cake

Using the Contraction and Convergence (C&C) model, we can work out a potential regional 'carbon budget’ for the whole of the South West. By doing so, we can develop broad estimates of how the region as a whole needs to reduce its CO2 emissions over the coming decade, which will be a big help when considering future regional plans and strategies. Keeping within the new budget will be helped by the fact that the government is now measuring emissions across the country each year, and publishing results at a regional level, so that we can see how well we are doing against our Fair Share – in fact we have used the latest government figures to determine what our individual emissions are now!

The way we have calculated the regional budget is to take the C&C per-capita figures for each person in the UK for the 10 years between 2007-2017, and then multiplied that by the expected number of people in the region for each year over the same time period. (These ‘projected’ population figures are produced and provided by the UK Office for National Statistics). The resulting figures for the region are:

Year       C&C      SW Pop SW      ‘Regional Budget’
            UK CO2     (Millions)     (Million Tonnes CO2)
2007       8.43            5.15                     43.4
2008       8.26            5.18                     42.3
2009       8.09            5.21                     42.0
2010       7.90            5.24                     41.5
2011       7.70            5.27                     41.0
2012       7.50            5.31                     40.0
2013       7.29            5.34                     39.0
2014       7.08            5.37                     38.0
2015       6.84            5.41                     37.0
2016       6.63            5.44                     36.0