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The FLOWSA tool in the Context of Standardized Environmental-Economic Accounts with a Demonstration of Use for Creating a U.S. Air Emissions Account
Citation:
Birney, C., M. Chambers, AND W. Ingwersen. The FLOWSA tool in the Context of Standardized Environmental-Economic Accounts with a Demonstration of Use for Creating a U.S. Air Emissions Account. Meeting of the OECD Working Group on Air Emissions Accounts, Cincinnati, OH, March 13, 2024.
Impact/Purpose:
This presentation was given at the invitation of experts at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in preparation of Standardized Environmental Economic Accounts. The purpose is to present the EPA FLOWSA tool in the context of developing a national environmental-economic account.
Description:
Developing SEEA accounts requires collecting environmental emissions or resource use data and associating it with sectors that supply or use these resources, making it parallel to standardized national economic accounts.There are other fields of applied science or environmental accounting which requires a similar exercise. The one I work in is environmental input-output analysis which can be considered a subdiscipline of industrial ecology, and we prepare these accounts as an input into an environmentally-extended input-output (EEIO). Associating environmental data with sectors cannot use reported data directly because they are often not reported in that way and they don't always come from a single source, so they require models to prepare them. Maybe "models" are considered too refined for this practice, but humor me. We found whether we were working with minerals extracted, water used, toxic releases, waste generation, or jobs, the procedure and methods could be considered generic, or part of a single discipline of modeling.Without knowing of another name given to this discipline, we call it flow sector attribution modeling. We provide an overview of this discipline and our implementation of it in the FLOWSA python package. We introduce flow-by-activity and flow-by-sector nomenclature and various attribution methods. We emphasize the role of validation in each step of data transformation, as well as storage of critical metadata information on source datasets as well as methods used for analysis. A demonstration is provided on the use of FLOWSA for creating an air emission account for the U.S.