The GEAR members Luis A. López, María Ángeles Cadarso, Jorge Zafrilla, and Guadalupe Arce have recently published their last contribution in the prestigious journal Nature Communications.
The paper, entitled “The carbon footprint of the U.S. multinationals’ foreign affiliates” presents a novel and insightful contribution in the field of environmental economics. Among other relevant results, the activity of the U.S. multinationals foreign affiliates accounts for more than 0.5 GtCO2 in global terms. More than 1.5% of global emissions. If foreign U.S. multinationals’ activity would be cataloged as a country, it would be ranked the 12th top emitter in the world.
Policy implications behind the results of the paper are clear. Multinational enterprises need to be a part of the solution in the fight against climate change reducing the environmental pressure within their operations and supply chains. A more environmentally sustainable choice of suppliers, the reduction in the use of energy and materials intensive inputs and the technology transfers to affiliates, are some of the key decisions that headquarters have to take into consideration.
A nice paper in a great journal!
We hope you enjoy it!
This work was supported by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (ECO2016–78938-R) and by the “Plan Propio de Investigación” of the University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM).
LINK TO THE OPEN ACCESS PAPER: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09473-7
UCLM PRESS RELEASE: https://www.uclm.es/es/Noticias/Noticias2019/Abril/Albacete/GEAR
