What Is EEMRIO Analysis?

EEMRIO stands for Environmentally Extended Multi-Regional Input-Output analysis. It is a method for calculating the environmental footprint — most commonly greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions — embedded in economic activity, traced across the global supply chains and regions that activity depends on. In short, EEMRIO answers the question: "For every pound or euro spent in a given sector and region, how much carbon is ultimately emitted, anywhere in the world, to make that happen?"

Breaking down the acronym

Each part of "EEMRIO" describes a layer of the method:

• Input-Output (IO) — the foundation, developed by economist Wassily Leontief. An input-output table maps how every sector of an economy buys from and sells to every other sector. Buying steel feeds construction; construction feeds retail, and so on.
• Multi-Regional (MR) — the model links many countries and regions together, so a purchase in one country can pull emissions from suppliers in dozens of others. This is what captures imported emissions that single-country models miss.
• Environmentally Extended (EE) — each sector is tagged with environmental data (such as tonnes of CO₂e emitted per unit of output), so the economic flows can be converted into an environmental footprint.

How EEMRIO works, step by step

You don't need the linear algebra to use EEMRIO, but the logic is worth understanding:

• 1. Start with final demand. Final demand is the spending you want to analyse — for example, a company's annual procurement broken down by sector and region.
• 2. Trace the supply chain. The model uses the input-output table to follow that spending backwards through every supplier, and every supplier's supplier, to an effectively infinite depth.
• 3. Apply emission factors. Each step's economic activity is multiplied by its environmental intensity, then summed. The result is the total embedded emissions — including Scope 3, the hard-to-measure supply-chain emissions.

Because the heavy maths can be pre-computed into a multiplier matrix, a full analysis of thousands of sector-region combinations runs in milliseconds once your data is uploaded.

What is EXIOBASE?

EEMRIO needs a dataset to run on, and the most widely used one is EXIOBASE. EXIOBASE is a global, harmonised multi-regional environmentally extended input-output database. Jarrly uses EXIOBASE v3.9.6, which covers 49 regions (44 countries plus 5 rest-of-world regions) across 200 sectors, with detailed environmental accounts including greenhouse gases. It is published under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence.

EEMRIO vs USEEIO — which should you use?

EEMRIO (via EXIOBASE) is multi-regional and is the best fit for UK and EU spending, where supply chains are highly international. USEEIO (United States Environmentally-Extended Input-Output) is the US EPA's public-domain, single-region model, optimised for USA spending with 402 BEA commodity sectors. The two are complementary rather than competing:

• Spending mostly in the UK / EU? Use EEMRIO via EXIOBASE.
• Spending mostly in the USA? Use USEEIO.

Jarrly's Carbon Calculator supports both in one tool, so you can pick the model that matches where your money is actually spent.

Why use EEMRIO for carbon accounting?

• It captures Scope 3. Most of an organisation's footprint sits in its supply chain. EEMRIO estimates these emissions from spending data alone, without needing every supplier to report.
• It's consumption-based. Emissions are attributed to the buyer who ultimately drives them, including emissions "imported" from abroad.
• It's fast and comprehensive. A spend-based screening footprint can be produced in minutes, giving a complete picture before you invest in supplier-specific data.

How to run an EEMRIO analysis with Jarrly

• 1. Choose your region — select UK / EU (EEMRIO via EXIOBASE).
• 2. Upload your Final Demand file — an .xlsx of spending by sector and region (a blank template is provided).
• 3. Select columns — pick which spending columns to analyse.
• 4. Run and download — get a publication-ready results spreadsheet with citations.