Green National Accounts for Denmark 2015-2016

Statistics Denmark’s Green National Accounts highlight the link between the economy and the environment through environmental-economic accounting. The feature publication titled “Green National Accounts for Denmark 2015-2016” is the final outcome of a three-year project which has developed a full set of environmental-economic accounts for Denmark according to the principles of the international statistical standard System of Environmental-Economic Accounting 2012 – Central Framework.

Based on these accounts, the publication presents a broad overview of recent Danish developments and resulting pressures on the environment, as well as describing how stocks of natural resources and land cover/use has developed, and the extent to which “green” activities are part of the economy.

The environmental-economic accounts are organised in 13 modules, each of which is presented in a separate chapter in the report. Furthermore, the report includes a chapter presenting a number of SDG-indicators for Denmark based on data from the accounts. A summary of the recent developments based on selected key indicators from the accounts is also presented.

Some of the publication’s key findings are:

• The use of renewable energy increased by 5 per cent from 2015 to 2016
• Each inhabitant of Denmark created an average of two tonnes of waste in 2016, 68 per cent of which was recycled.
• The production of green products employed more than 71,000 people and had a 214 DKK billion turnover in 2016.

Less greenhouse gases emitted per unit of GDP

The publication highlights the relationships between the economy and the environment. Among other things, it is shown that a decoupling between growth in GDP and growth in greenhouse gas emissions has taken place.

If Danish emissions of greenhouse gases had increased as much as demand for Danish produced goods since 1990, emissions would have been around 39 million tonnes of CO₂-equivalents higher than in 1990. Due to the aforementioned decoupling brought about by various structural changes in the economy emissions are instead 19 million tonnes of CO₂-equivalents lower today than they were in 1990.