David Presberger

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Presberger

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David

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0000-0002-8817-5352

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Publications 1 - 7 of 7

Protecting the environment at home or abroad?
Presberger, David; Kolcava, Dennis; Bernauer, Thomas (2024)
Environmental Research Letters
By importing goods whose production affects the environment abroad, wealthy countries are 'offshoring' a large share of their total environmental footprint of consumption to less affluent societies. We argue that current efforts to mitigate this problem, which focus largely on informational policy instruments for global supply chains, could result in unintended side effects. The reason pertains to a potential tradeoff between a home bias in consumption and the geographic allocation of environmental impacts. We develop a theoretical argument on how consumers may respond when they prefer a domestically produced good but are made aware that this results in more environmental damage at home, compared to importing the same product from abroad. Based on choice experiments in Germany, Japan, and the United States, we observe that information provision can reduce consumer demand for environmentally harmful products, but also find some support for environmental NIMBYism when environmental and provenance information are combined. The key implication of this finding is that policymakers should address potentially unintended side-effects of more stringent informational requirements for global supply chains.
Could closing the knowledge gap help in reducing global environmental impacts of local consumption?
Presberger, David; Quoß, Franziska; Rudolph, Lukas; et al. (2022)
OSF Preprints
Vastly increased international trade over the past few decades has resulted in an ever larger geographical spread in the environmental impacts of local consumption. Particularly in the case of high-income countries, a large share of their total environmental footprint of local consumption now materializes in places far beyond the respective national border. On the presumption that democratic policy-makers should, and often do, act in line with prevailing public opinion we examine whether currently weak policies addressing consumption-based environmental impacts abroad may reflect a knowledge gap amongst citizens, and how closing this knowledge gap would affect policy preferences concerning the greening of international supply chains. We do so based on an experiment, embedded in a large representative survey (N=8’000) in Switzerland, a high-income country with a very large extraterritorial environmental footprint. The main finding is that there is a major knowledge gap amongst the mass public in this area, and that this gap can be closed. However, closing the knowledge gap does not lead to a significant change in policy preferences in favor of reducing the global environmental footprint of local consumption. This points to major policy challenges in trying to mitigate problems of environmental impact shifting in the global economy.
How to estimate whether preferential trade agreements contribute to international environmental impact shifting. A new methodology and empirical illustration for Switzerland
Jönsson, Oskar Martin; Presberger, David; Pfister, Stephan; et al. (2023)
Ecological Economics
We present a new methodological approach for estimating the international relocation of environmental impacts of consumption through trade liberalisation. Our approach reconstructs changes in import flows after the entry into force of a preferential trade agreement (PTA) while taking into account different dynamics of trade diversion and trade growth. Our empirical application focuses on whether and how much the entry into force of 25 PTAs affected greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions embodied in Swiss imports between 2000 and 2018. The analysis is based on a unique dataset for more than 7′ 000 products that includes information on whether and how much of a given product was imported under a particular PTA or other trade rules. We find that the relocation of embodied GHG emissions attributed to the 25 PTAs is relatively small compared to the overall increase in imported GHG emissions. Most of the additional relocation of GHG emissions via trade diversion between 2000–2018 took place via imports under other trade rules. These findings indicate that the marginal effect of additional PTAs only has a small effect on overall embodied emissions in imports, at least when it comes to GHG emissions and as long as these PTAs have a similar scope as prior trade liberalisations. Given the widespread controversies over the environmental implications of PTAs, our approach provides a useful template for ex-post assessments of such implications. The results of such assessments can help stakeholders and policymakers in designing evidence based policies to identify and mitigate the “outsourcing” environmental impacts of consumption that may result from PTAs.
Factual information on the environmental impacts of consumption abroad increases citizens' problem awareness, but not support for mitigating such impacts
Presberger, David; Quoß, Franziska; Rudolph, Lukas; et al. (2023)
Environmental Science & Policy
Vastly increased international trade over the past few decades has resulted in an ever larger geographical spread in the environmental impacts of local consumption. Particularly in the case of high-income countries, a large share of their total environmental footprint of local consumption now materializes in places far beyond the respective national border. On the presumption that democratic policy-makers should, and often do, act in line with prevailing public opinion we examine whether currently weak policies addressing consumption-based environmental impacts abroad may reflect a gap in knowledge among citizens, and how closing this gap would affect policy preferences concerning the greening of international supply chains. We do so based on an experiment, embedded in a large representative survey (N = 8’000) in Switzerland, a high-income country with a very large extraterritorial environmental footprint. The main finding is that there is a major gap in knowledge among the mass public in this area, and that this gap can be closed. However, closing the information gap does not lead to a significant change in policy preferences in favor of reducing the global environmental footprint of local consumption. This points to major policy challenges in trying to mitigate problems of environmental impact shifting in the global economy.
Economic and political drivers of environmental impact shifting between countries
Presberger, David; Bernauer, Thomas (2023)
Global Environmental Change
There is mounting evidence that major improvements in environmental quality in high-income countries over the past decades may have been achieved to a large degree through relocation of environmental impacts of consumption to other, usually poorer countries. While political and academic debates on appropriate policy interventions to address this challenge are gaining ground, we still know rather little about the drivers of international environmental impact shifting, other than international trade flows per se. We address this issue by focusing on the effects of economic inequality and political factors. We argue that income inequality between and within countries as well as variation in political institutions, environmental clauses in preferential trade agreements (PTAs), and participation in international environmental treaties could be important drivers or mitigators of environmental impact shifting between countries. We use novel panel data on five types of environmental impact flows between country dyads (187 countries, 1990–2015) to assess these arguments. We find that richer countries and countries with higher domestic economic equality tend to be the “outsourcers”, and poorer, domestically more unequal countries the “insourcers” of environmental impacts. Discrepancies in democracy levels aggravate the outsourcing from more equal to more unequal societies. In turn, environmental clauses in PTAs have a mitigating effect on environmental impact shifting, but participation in international environmental agreements has no such effect. Our findings highlight the need for green economy policies that reduce environmental footprints of consumption not only within high-income democracies, but also make their global supply chains more sustainable.
Does international “offshoring” of environmental impacts reflect consumer NIMBYism?
Presberger, David; Kolcava, Dennis; Bernauer, Thomas (2022)
OSF Preprints
Consumption of imported goods whose production affects the natural environment abroad implies international ``insourcing'' of consumer benefits and ``outsourcing'' of environmental impacts. We examine to what extent consumer choices driving such ecological outsourcing in the aggregate, often from the Global North to the Global South, are motivated by environmental NIMBY (not in my backyard) preferences. The analysis relies on an original survey-embedded choice experiment in three large, high-income economies (Germany, Japan, United States, total N=7,494). We find considerable support for environmental NIMBYism in consumer decisions. Whereas consumers generally tend to prefer domestically sourced products, this home bias becomes weaker with increasing environmental impacts of production. One important implication of this finding is that policy makers should address potential unintended side-effects of more stringent eco-labeling requirements. The latter may in fact contribute to further ecological outsourcing by making both information on environmental impacts and product provenance more explicit.
Determinants of International Environmental Impact Shifting
Presberger, David (2023)
Consumption in high-income countries is linked to environmental degradation around the world. Addressing the environmental consequences of consumption is key to handling global environmental challenges and environmental injustices between lower- and higher-income countries. This dissertation maps and explains the driving forces behind environmental impact shifting, a process in which environmental impacts (e.g., water pollution, deforestation, land use, and greenhouse gas emissions) are offshored from one country to another mainly through consumption. To explain the drivers of environmental impact shifting, this dissertation examines the societal and political factors at the macro, micro, and meso level that contribute to the relocation of environmental degradation. At the macro level, this dissertation examines how environmental impacts embodied in international trade are shifted between countries and which country-specific factors, such as economic inequality, democracy, and participation in multilateral agreements, influence this process. On the micro level, the dissertation focuses on the effects that consumer decisions and citizens' environmental concern can have on offshoring of environmental degradation, as well as which policies individuals prefer to mitigate the relocation of environmental impacts. Concerning the meso level, the dissertation examines the attention policymakers pay to environmental issues at home and abroad by analyzing parliamentary debates on the international dimension of environmental degradation. The findings of this dissertation indicate that on the macro level, clear drivers that affect how environmental impacts are shifted between countries are economic inequality and democracy levels. Affluence, equality, and higher levels of democracy lead to more offshoring of pollution to poorer, less equal, and less democratic countries. Only environmental provisions in trade agreements appear to be capable of reducing the relocation of environmental impact flows between countries. With respect to the micro level, the findings of this dissertation suggest that when citizens receive information about the total environmental impact of consumption, their awareness and concern increase. However, citizens' preferences on policy measures to mitigate environmental impact shifting remain largely unchanged. Hence, on the micro level, citizens change their attitudes but not their policy preference when faced with information on the environmental impact their nation's consumption has abroad. Furthermore, in their purchasing decisions, consumers from higher-income countries directly contribute to outsourcing of environmental impacts by indicating a higher willingness to pay for decreasing the environmental footprint when a good is produced at home rather than abroad. Hence, discrimination between products according to where the environment is polluted could contribute to environmental impact shifting. On the meso level, this dissertation finds that the global environmental consequences of consumption are still an issue hardly discussed in parliamentary speeches. However, concerning the context in which environmental issues are discussed in general, the findings show that nationalist members of parliament in the German Bundestag are less inclined to speak about the international dimension of environmental issues, whereas the opposite is true in the British House of Commons. Findings on the meso level show that party systems play an important role in how much attention policymakers pay to the international dimension of environmental issues. In sum, the findings of this dissertation imply that there are clear micro-level forces in high-income countries that drive outsourcing of environmental impacts. The results of this dissertation show the need to further increase transparency about the global external consequences of consumption.

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