Study reveals how democracies are offshoring their pollution

New research from ETH Zurich University and the University of Essex has raised some ethical issues by asking whether democracies should  be held accountable for pollution caused in other countries by their consumption?

The researchers examined whether more democratic countries are more likely to outsource greenhouse gas emissions by importing goods from countries where those goods are produced in polluting ways. Furthermore, they looked at whether these practices helped the environmental performance of democratic countries appear misleadingly positive.

The main measurement for democracy used in the research came from the V-Dem Electoral Democracy Index, which considers whether countries hold clean elections, allow free speech, have an independent media, and give people real political choices. 

The pollution offshoring data came from previous research and was based on how much pollution a country effectively ‘exports’ by importing goods made elsewhere, especially in countries with less stringent environmental legislation.

The research used data from 161 countries between 1990 and 2015, accounting accounted for population size and economic development (GDP per person), since these are known to affect pollution levels.

Their findings suggests that democracies may appear to be cleaner partly because they move pollution elsewhere, suggesting that this should be taken into account when assessing a country’s environmental performance. 

The authors also suggest that future research should explore geographic factors influencing pollution offshoring and identify which pollutants most drive the emissions gap between democracies and non-democracies.

The research concludes: ‘From a policy perspective, the main implication of our findings is that democracies, and high-income democracies in particular, should consider re-orienting their environmental policy focus from primarily territorial to global environmental impacts of their domestic economic activity. What is more, our findings clearly question the often-claimed “moral high ground” of democracies vis-à-vis autocracies regarding environmental performance.’

The full research can be read here.