Measuring Ecological Footprint of Fossil Fuels in Economic Sectors of Iran: An Input-Output Approach

Abstract

One of the essential indices for measuring sustainable development is ecological footprint. This paper which focuses on concept of ecological footprint of fossil fuels, tries to answer two important questions. The first question is wether the pattern of export and import of energy content in Iran confirms its comparative advantage? The second question is how much is the ecological footprint of Iranian economic sectors in year 2011? To measure ecological footprint of fossil fuels, we employ two different databases in this article, first activity by activity symmetric I-O table calculated by Iranian Statistical Center for year 2011 and second, Hydrocarbon Balance Sheet of year 2011. Our main results are presented based on two scenarios. In the first scenario, production technology is identical between Iran and other countries, and in the second scenario production technology isn’t the same. Our results based on two scenarios show that in macro level Iranian economy has trade surplus in fossil fuels content. But in sectoral level, 23 and 18 economic sectors have trade deficit in energy content based on first and second scenarios respectively. Ecological footprint based on our first scenario is more than 191 million hectares and the deficit per person is 2.3 hectare. In the second scenario the ecological footprint is 184 million hectares and the deficit per person is 2.2 hectares. Our conclusion is that because of low level of energy productivity in Iran, the results of second scenario are more realistic.

Keywords

• sustainable development
• ecological footprint
• energy content
• input-output analysis