The Carbon Trap: Fragmentation, Accounting Hegemony, and Justice in Global Carbon Governance

ABSTRACT

Carbon accounting is increasingly treated as the technical foundation of global climate action, yet the rules through which emissions are measured, converted, attributed, and disclosed remain fragmented across national inventories, corporate reporting standards, supply‐chain boundaries, and trade‐related policy instruments. This paper argues that such fragmentation is not only a technical problem of inconsistent metrics, but also a governance problem that shapes how climate responsibility, compliance costs, investment signals, and health‐relevant mitigation benefits are distributed. Three connected dimensions structure the analysis: the accounting gap generated by different greenhouse‐gas conversion metrics and inventory conventions; carbon drift through international trade, where territorial emission reductions can coexist with outsourced embodied emissions; and the Scope 3 gap, where value‐chain emissions remain difficult to measure, compare, and verify. By explicitly contextualizing these technical disagreements within the broader carbon‐emissions literature, this study contributes a governance‐oriented synthesis showing how metric selection, trade‐embodied emissions, and Scope 3 disclosure jointly shape emission visibility, responsibility allocation, and policy interpretation. Drawing on re‐visualized and critically interpreted evidence from published studies on methane accounting, trade‐embodied emissions, corporate carbon footprints, consumption‐based accounting, emission responsibility allocation, and the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, the paper shows how apparently neutral accounting choices can reinforce asymmetries between high‐income service‐oriented economies and export‐dependent developing economies. At the same time, the paper avoids treating carbon accounting reform as a simple North–South zero‐sum problem. Production‐based accounting, consumption‐based accounting, MRIO models, emission responsibility allocation, corporate Scope 3 disclosure, and border adjustment mechanisms each improve visibility in some dimensions while introducing their own uncertainties and fairness dilemmas. The way forward is therefore not to replace one accounting system with another, but to build a layered system that combines territorial inventories, consumption‐side disclosure, value‐chain verification, capacity building, and health‐sensitive co‐benefit assessment. Such reform matters for climate justice and for climate‐health governance: inaccurate or politically biased carbon accounts can misdirect mitigation finance, delay reductions in short‐lived climate pollutants and fossil‐fuel combustion, and weaken opportunities to deliver cleaner air and public‐health gains alongside decarbonization. A more transparent and justice‐oriented carbon accounting architecture should therefore serve not only carbon markets and trade policy, but also equitable, health‐protective climate governance.