CO2 mitigation from a national accounts’ perspect

CO2 mitigation policies are one of the main tools to reduce CO2 emissions from industries. Unfortunately, the link between GDP growth and emissions trends has not been directly addressed. In this document, we propose a method for decomposing the growth of CO2 emissions based on information from national accounts, which breaks down the rate of variation of emissions into three components: scale, composition, and mitigation. This method directly measures the effectiveness of mitigation efforts at the national level. Using Chilean data for the last two decades, we show that, without mitigation attempts, total CO2 emissions would have increased nearly 50 percentage points more than the actual number.