Improving the UKMRIO’s Material Footprint

The UK’s Multi-Regional Input-Output database (UKMRIO) is used to calculate the UK’s material footprint as well as a number of other environmental and economic indicators. The UKMRIO is constructed from National Accounts data from the UK’s Office for National Statistics, as well as from international trade data from a global Multi-Regional Input-Output (GMRIO) databases. As research on the UK’s carbon and greenhouse gas footprints has recommended switching the GMRIO input data from FIGARO to EXIOBASE, this research aims to understand the impacts of this switch on the material footprint. This analysis is particularly timely and necessary, as these databases have very different levels of disaggregation of the mining and quarrying sector – a key sector for the material footprint. While EXIOBASE subdivides this into 14 distinct sectors, FIGARO contains only a single mining and quarrying sector. The UK National Accounts, which make up the UK’s economic data in the UKMRIO, on the other hand contain 4 sectors for mining and quarrying. To assess the impact of this switch, this report undertakes two analyses. First, we aim to understand the impact of aggregating mining on the material footprint by calculating the UK’s consumption-based material footprint from EXIOBASE with mining and quarrying disaggregated to 1, 4, and 14 sectors. Second, we assess the impact of using FIGARO data in the UKMRIO on the UK’s material footprint and provide recommendations for method improvements. Our findings show that while 4 mining sectors provide a good approximation of 14 mining sectors, having only a single mining sector overestimates the UK’s material footprint. We therefore provide a new method which uses EXIOBASE proportions to disaggregate FIGARO’s single mining sector into 4 distinct sectors. Using the disaggregated version of the FIGARO dataset provides a practical solution to improve both the material and the carbon footprints.