Greenhouse Gases Emissions and Economic Performance of Livestock, an Environmental Input-Output Analysis

Abstract: In the last three decades, the developing countries have sharply increased its contribution to global warming. From 2005 to 2012, Brazil has reduced its total emissions in 12% due to deforestation control. In the same period, the total GHG emissions excluding land-use change and forestry have increased 18% (WRI, 2014), while per capita GPD has raised 17%. The Brazilian climate policy must go beyond the deforestation control to avoid an unsustainable pattern of development. Since the mitigation effort bears heavily on primary activities, one must ask: how important are those sectors for Brazilian economy? And how their emissions are connected to other sectors along the productive chain? Specifically, this paper aims to calculate the GHG emissions multipliers of the Brazilian economy in 2009 and associate these results with the employment and income multipliers, particularly of the Agriculture sector. The ‘field of influence’ method (SONIS and HEWINGS, 1992) is applied to calculate the intersectorial relations in terms of input linkages and GHG emissions.