Its estimate is the first that covers the entire national economy, encompassing a total of 56 product and service categories, rather than individual products or services.

“The carbon handprint casts light on the emission benefit gained by the customer. This is believed to increase customer interest in choosing products and services that are better in terms of their climate impacts, thereby also encouraging companies to develop new, low-carbon solutions,” explained Laura Sokka, a senior researcher at Syke.

Carbon handprint refers to the potential positive climate impact created by replacing a product or service with a less emission-intensive alternative. The size of the handprint thereby depends on where the alternative products and services are presumed to have been produced, noted Syke. Other EU countries, for example, produce their export products and services with fairly similar emissions as Finland.

Syke identified Finnish chemicals industry, metals industry, forest industry and electronics industry products as products with a large carbon handprint.

For 11 of the categories the carbon footprint was larger than the footprint of global alternatives. Syke pointed out, though, that its estimate differs from earlier studies in that it does not account for replacement potential across product categories.

“One example of replacements across product categories is replacing fossil fuels with biofuels in the field of transport fuels. In our follow-up work, we will mull over how the replacements between product categories could be systematically taken into consideration in determining the carbon handprint of all exports,” said Hannu Savolainen, the senior researcher in charge of the research team at Syke.

Aleksi Teivainen – HT