Environmental Impact of Changes in Structure of Household Consumption in Urban and Rural Areas: Environmental Input–Output Approach

The consumption of households and its structure has an important role in the rate of energy consumption and related air pollutant emissions. This study investigates the effect of changes in the structure of consumption in urban and rural areas on the emission of three main energy-related air pollutants (CO2, SO2, and NOX) in Iran during 2001-2011. To this aim, the environmentally extended input-output tables and structural decomposition analysis (SDA) were used. As the contribution of this study, the consumption of households is decomposed into two factors: total consumption and consumption structure. The results revealed that the changes in consumption structure in rural and urban areas increased the emission of all three air pollutants. The effect of changes in total consumption in both urban and rural areas outweighs the effect of changes in consumption structure. The negative environmental impact of urban households is worse than rural ones. The results at sectoral level showed that the changes in urban consumption structure had the main effect on CO2 emission in “water, gas and electricity” (135.68 Mt CO2), “chemical and plastics industry” (30.13 Mt CO2), and “food, clothing and textiles industry” (6.41 Mt CO2) whilst the changes in rural consumption structure had the main effect on CO2 emission in “water, gas and electricity” (25.39 Mt CO2), “chemical and plastics industry” (19.98 Mt CO2), and “food, clothing and textiles industry” (1.74 Mt CO2).