Hidden Carbon in Turkiye's Exports Revealed by New Multi-Stage

Author: Sloane Callahan Published: 2026-10-03T23:42:05Z Source: scienmag.com Language: en

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Hidden Carbon in Turkiye's Exports Revealed by New Multi-Stage

Hidden Carbon in Turkiye’s Exports Revealed by New Multi-Stage Analysis

October 3, 2026

By Sloane Callahan Scienmag Editorial Profile - Climate Mitigation

Hidden Carbon in Turkiye's Exports Revealed by New Multi-Stage Analysis

Hidden Carbon in Turkiye's Exports Revealed by New Multi-Stage Analysis

Every container ship that leaves a Turkish port carries more than textiles, machinery, or refined petroleum products. It also carries an invisible cargo: the carbon dioxide that was released into the atmosphere to produce those goods. A new study published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology by Emre Ünal of Fırat University and Banu Erkök of Başkent University has traced that hidden cargo with unusual precision, following emissions not just to the point of export but backward through every domestic production stage that feeds into it. Their findings paint a sobering picture of a major trading economy whose carbon efficiency is deteriorating across most of its key export destinations, and whose exposure to future carbon leakage risks is far more concentrated than conventional accounting methods suggest.

The research tackles a long-standing blind spot in climate economics. When a country exports goods, the emissions generated in producing them are counted in the exporting nation’s territorial inventory, even though the goods are consumed elsewhere. This mismatch, known as the problem of embodied or trade-embedded emissions, has been studied extensively since Davis and Caldeira’s landmark consumption-based accounting work, but most analyses treat exports as a single undifferentiated flow. Ünal and Erkök argue that this flattening hides the very information policymakers need. An export of finished consumer goods and an export of intermediate components that feed a partner’s own industrial production have very different implications for how carbon pricing, border adjustments, or supply chain regulations will shift emissions between countries.

To unpack these differences, the authors deploy an environmentally extended input-output framework built on the Eora Global Supply Chain Database, combined with a technique called the Multi-Stage Hypothetical Extraction Method. Hypothetical extraction is a thought experiment rendered in matrix algebra: the analyst mathematically removes a sector, or a demand channel, from the economy’s input-output structure and measures how much output and, in this case, how much carbon dioxide the rest of the system loses as a result. The difference between the original economy and the extracted one quantifies the sector’s total systemic importance, capturing both its direct emissions and the emissions embedded in all the upstream linkages that depend on it. The multi-stage refinement goes further by decomposing exports into intermediate goods and final goods, and by splitting final demand into household consumption, government expenditure, and investment channels, allowing emissions to be traced along distinct domestic production stages for each destination market.

The study focuses on six major trading partners of Türkiye: France, Germany, Iraq, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This selection spans the European Union markets that dominate Turkish trade, the transatlantic relationship, and a neighboring energy economy, providing a diverse test bed for the method. For each partner, the researchers calculated the carbon dioxide emissions embodied in Turkish exports and, crucially, a set of efficiency measures that relate those emissions to the economic value delivered. It is the efficiency dimension that produced the study’s most alarming headline result: a systemic deterioration in carbon dioxide efficiency across most destinations, meaning that progressively more emissions are being generated per unit of export value delivered to these markets.

The structural decomposition reveals that intermediate goods typically dominate the emissions profile of Turkish exports. This matters because intermediate goods occupy a particularly awkward position in climate policy. They cross borders as inputs to further production, so their embodied carbon will only be fully accounted for when the final product is eventually sold, often in a third country. Under mechanisms such as the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, which is designed to prevent carbon leakage by pricing the embedded emissions of imports, the treatment of intermediate goods remains one of the most contested design questions. The finding that Türkiye’s export emissions concentrate in these upstream flows suggests that the country’s industrial base is deeply integrated into European and global value chains in ways that make it structurally exposed to any tightening of carbon accounting at the border.

The United Kingdom emerges as a distinctive case. Unlike the other partners, where either intermediate or final goods tend to dominate, the UK’s import profile from Türkiye shows a broad reliance on both categories simultaneously. This dual dependence means that British demand pulls carbon out of the Turkish economy through two separate channels at once, amplifying the total systemic liability and complicating any single-lever policy response. As the UK develops its own post-Brexit carbon border policies, the study’s results imply that Turkish exporters will face pressure from both ends of their product mix rather than from a single vulnerable segment.

Perhaps the most striking results concern the role of government demand, which behaves in sharply different ways depending on the partner. In France and Italy, state-procured government expenditures drive intense emissions liabilities, channeled primarily through Türkiye’s petroleum and chemical sectors.