Greenhouse gas emissions reductions are urgently necessary to mitigate the effects of climate change. Several protocols and agreements are in place to reduce emissions, but global emissions continue to rise nonetheless. This is in part due to emissions offshoring: the shift of manufacturing from countries with developed economies to countries with developing economies. While many countries have achieved reductions through technological advancements, offshoring remains an issue, demonstrated by a global emissions increase despite developed economies reducing their emissions. Trends of atmospheric emission of nitrogen oxides (NOX), which can be used as a surrogate for gauging sustainability with respect to fossil fuel combustion, confirm this issue. Canada has a developed economy and purports to have reduced emissions in recent decades. Countries accounting for 90% of the dollar value of manufactured goods imported to Canada from 1990 to 2022 were analyzed. Canada shows a decrease in NOX emissions attributed to manufacturing alongside an increase in imports of manufactured products. Human Development Index (HDI), a United Nations metric for the development level of a country, was plotted against relative manufacturing NOX emissions on a country basis. There are distinct trends over the time period among low, medium, high, and very high HDI categories for the top countries importing to Canada. Piecewise linear regressions were run for each country, allowing the number of breaks to be equivalent to the number of HDI category changes spanned over the time period. As the HDI category increased, the number of countries with an inverse relationship between HDI and NOX emissions grew. Countries with very high HDI almost all showed that the HDI increase corresponded to lower emissions of NOX, while countries with lower HDI categories showed a reduction in this trend. The results support the theory that Canada has offshored manufacturing emissions rather than decreasing the emissions they are responsible for in terms of their manufactured goods.
Lehman et al. (Fri,) studied this question.