Optimisation of the length of global supply chain for decarbon purpose

Economic globalisation has boosted production and consumption, improving living standards but increasing demand for long distance trade transportation and carbon emissions. This paper maps global export cargo turnover as the length of the global supply chain (SCL) and introduces a method to calculate each country's carbon emissions based on consumer responsibility. The method considers emissions from manufacturing, transportation and technological disparities of finished goods between countries. To minimise total costs, including carbon costs, we optimise the SCL. Empirical analysis of by taking China, the USA, Japan, European Union and ASEAN as a small and closed area shows a 43.69% reduction in optimised SCL. The USA contributes 59.31% of this reduction, 8.5 times that of China and 18 times that of ASEAN. Under this optimisation, total carbon emissions from manufacturing will drop by 6.62%, with China experiencing the largest decrease (25.23%) and the USA the largest increase (15.91%). [Submitted: 24 February 2024; Accepted: 4 September 2024]