Abstract
This technical report (JNCC Report 808) constitutes the most up-to-date technical and methodological documentation for an official statistic which estimates the global environmental impacts of UK consumption for a range of metrics. Previous versions of the report were published in December 2024 (JNCC Report 786), November 2023 (JNCC Report 746), December 2022 (JNCC Report 715), and October 2021 (JNCC Report 695) – copies are available via The National Archives website. The statistic also forms part of the UK Biodiversity Indicators compendium ('Global biodiversity impacts of UK economic activity / sustainable consumption'), last updated in December 2025.
Further information on the statistic is provided on the Indicator webpage. An accompanying datasheet, containing the total estimate for each impact type associated with all UK consumption (of all commodities and from all countries/territories combined) is available as a separate resource from JNCC's Resource Hub.
Several additional datasets are explained in the technical report and are available to download in csv format:
- results-total-annual: aggregated results showing the total estimate for each impact type associated with all UK consumption (of all commodities and from all countries/territories combined) for each year.
- producing-country-results: results showing the total estimate for each impact type associated with UK consumption, broken down by the producing country/territory in which the impact took place (but aggregated across all commodities produced within that country/territory) for each year.
- commodity-results: results showing the total estimate for each impact type associated with UK consumption, broken down by the commodity responsible for the impact (but aggregated across producing countries/territories from which the commodities came) for each year.
- uk-results-disaggregated: results showing the estimate for each impact type associated with UK consumption for each commodity in each country/territory of production.
The country/territory names in the datasets come from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.
Further datasets, including those relevant to other consuming countries/territories assessed, can be downloaded from the associated dashboard.
Please note that the GLORIA consumption model is used under the terms of a creative commons licence for non-commercial use (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/au/). We used Release 059a of the GLORIA global environmentally-extended MRIO database (Lenzen et al. 2021), constructed in the Global MRIO Lab (Lenzen et al. 2017).
Lenzen, M. Geschke, A. Abd Rahman, M.D. Xiao, Y. Fry, J. Reyes, R. Dietzenbacher, E. Inomata, S. Kanemoto, K. Los, B. Moran, D. Schulte in den Bäumen, H. Tukker, A. Walmsley, T. Wiedmann, T. Wood, R. & Yamano, N. 2017. The Global MRIO Lab - charting the world economy. Economic Systems Research, 29, 158-186.
Lenzen, M. Geschke, A. West, J. Fry, J. Malik, A. Giljum, S. Canals, L.M.i. Piñero, P. Lutter, S. Wiedmann, T. Li, M. Sevenster, M. Potočnik, J. Teixeira, I. Voore, M.V. Nansai, K. & Schandl, H. 2021. Implementing the Material Footprint to measure progress towards SDGs 8 and 12. Nature Sustainability, 5, 157-166.
These resources may not be fully accessible for all users. If you need a copy of any of these resources in a different or more accessible format, please get in touch.
