Southeast Asia’s Hidden Carbon Flows Mapped Like an Ecosystem Food Web

Southeast Asia’s economies have long been described as engines of global manufacturing, but a new study suggests they should also be understood as living metabolic systems, breathing carbon in and out through every stage of production and trade. In a paper published in Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy, researchers from De La Salle University in Manila and Shanghai Jiao Tong University applied an unusual pairing of methods—an environmentally extended multi-regional input-output model fused with ecological network analysis—to trace how embodied carbon moves through the eleven-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations and between the region and the rest of the world. Using 2023 trade and emissions data, the team built a quantitative picture of what they call ASEAN’s carbon metabolism, treating industrial sectors as if they were organisms in a food web, exchanging emissions rather than energy and nutrients.

The methodological foundation of the study rests on two well-established traditions. Input-output analysis, first formulated by Wassily Leontief in the 1930s, captures the web of economic transactions linking every sector to every other: to produce one unit of output, a sector must consume inputs from others, each of which consumes inputs in turn, generating a cascade of indirect effects. By extending these tables with emissions coefficients, researchers can compute the total carbon dioxide released, directly and indirectly, whenever a sector produces goods for final consumption or export. Ecological network analysis, developed by ecologists such as Brian Fath and Robert Ulanowicz, adds a second layer of insight. Originally designed to study flows of energy and matter through ecosystems, it borrows concepts like control, dependency, and mutualism to ask not just how much carbon flows through an economy, but who dominates whom within the network of flows.

The researchers aggregated the economy into seven macro-sectors and computed pull and drive weights, network utility relationships, and control metrics across the entire regional system. Pull weights describe how strongly a sector draws carbon embodied in inputs from upstream suppliers, while drive weights measure how powerfully a sector pushes emissions downstream through its own demands. Network utility analysis assesses whether pairwise relationships between sectors are mutually beneficial or exploitative in flow terms, and control analysis identifies which sectors effectively govern the behavior of others. Together, these indicators transform a dense matrix of monetary transactions and emissions data into a structural map that resembles the hierarchy of a natural ecosystem, with producers, intermediaries, and apex consumers of carbon.

The results reveal a striking inefficiency at the heart of the region’s carbon metabolism. Rather than transmitting embodied emissions efficiently from primary producers to final consumers, ASEAN’s network structure allows intermediate sectors to absorb a significant portion of the carbon flowing through the system. In ecological terms, the metabolism is sluggish: carbon pools in the middle of the food web instead of passing cleanly through it. This stagnation matters for policy because it means that interventions aimed only at final consumers or only at raw producers would miss much of the region’s embedded emissions. The finding points instead toward intermediate manufacturing processes as critical leverage points where carbon can be either locked in or released, depending on the technologies and energy sources those sectors use.

At the top of the hierarchy, the study found that upstream primary sectors—agriculture, mining, and energy transformation—exert strong influence over everything downstream. These sectors act as the region’s primary producers in the ecological sense, anchoring the flow of embodied carbon that ultimately supports construction, manufacturing, and services. Their dominance means that decarbonization efforts targeting electricity generation and resource extraction would ripple through the entire network, whereas efforts confined to downstream sectors would struggle to propagate upstream. At the opposite end of the hierarchy, the construction sector emerged as the primary dependent sector, sitting at the bottom of the control hierarchy and drawing heavily on embodied carbon generated by others. Any building boom in the region, the analysis implies, transmits demand for carbon deep into the economy’s upstream foundations.

Perhaps the most consequential finding is that ASEAN, taken as a whole, is a net exporter of embodied carbon to the rest of the world. The goods the region ships abroad carry more embedded emissions than the goods it imports, meaning that a substantial share of the carbon released within ASEAN’s borders is generated on behalf of foreign consumers. This asymmetry has long been recognized in global carbon accounting debates, but its implications have sharpened dramatically with the arrival of border carbon adjustment mechanisms. The European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, and similar instruments under consideration in other jurisdictions, are designed to charge importers for the embedded carbon in goods arriving from regions with weaker climate policies. For export-oriented ASEAN economies, the study’s findings read as a warning: the region’s carbon-intensive export chains are directly exposed to emerging carbon regulations.

The vulnerability is structural rather than incidental. Because upstream energy transformation and primary sectors control much of the network’s carbon flows, and because intermediate sectors absorb rather than pass on emissions, exporters cannot easily demonstrate clean supply chains even if final assembly becomes more efficient. Border carbon adjustments do not distinguish between a factory that has decarbonized and one embedded in a carbon-intensive grid; they measure the carbon embodied in the product. As long as ASEAN’s electricity mix remains fossil-heavy and its industrial intermediates carbon-intensive, the region’s manufacturers will carry a hidden carbon tariff risk regardless of their own operational improvements. The authors argue that this is why targeted grid decarbonization must be a regional priority rather than a national afterthought.

The study’s prescriptions extend beyond clean power. The authors highlight circular economy strategies in advanced manufacturing as a second pillar, noting that closing material loops within industrial networks can reduce the pull of embodied carbon from upstream extractive sectors. ASEAN has already adopted a framework for circular economy, and the network analysis provides a quantitative rationale for targeting it at the intermediate sectors where carbon flows currently stagnate. The third pillar is governance: harmonized regional carbon accounting. If each ASEAN member measures embodied carbon differently, the region cannot present a coherent response to border adjustments, and firms face conflicting reporting requirements across markets. A common accounting standard would allow the region to negotiate from a position of shared evidence rather than fragmented estimates.

The analytical framework itself is part of the study’s significance. Ecological network analysis has been applied to urban metabolism in Beijing, energy systems in Guangdong, and circular economy performance at the city level, but comprehensive multi-regional applications spanning ASEAN have been scarce. By combining the Asian Development Bank’s multi-regional input-output tables with environmental extensions covering air emissions, the researchers demonstrate that the tools of ecosystem science can be scaled to an entire trade bloc. The approach also offers interpretability advantages over black-box optimization models: network metrics like control and utility produce statements about sectoral relationships that policymakers can examine, contest, and act upon, rather than opaque numerical prescriptions.

The broader lesson is that climate policy and trade policy are now inseparable, and that understanding an economy’s structure—not just its total emissions—determines its resilience in a carbon-regulated world. ASEAN’s position as a net embodied carbon exporter is not merely an accounting curiosity; it is a measure of how much of the region’s industrial future depends on rules being written elsewhere. The study’s metabolic metaphor ultimately delivers a practical message: a food web with bloated intermediaries and dominant primary producers responds slowly to change, and an economy shaped the same way will respond slowly to decarbonization. Reshaping those flows—through cleaner grids, circular manufacturing, and shared carbon accounting—offers the region a path to keep its export engines running as the global economy begins charging for every tonne of carbon embodied in the goods it buys.

Subject of Research: Embodied carbon flows in ASEAN economies analyzed with input-output and ecological network analysis

Article Title: Multi-regional ecological network analysis of ASEAN’s carbon metabolism

Article References: Gue, I. H. V., Teng, J. R. C., Li, M., & Tan, R. R. (2026). Multi-regional ecological network analysis of ASEAN’s carbon metabolism. Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy, 28(11), Article 272. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10098-026-03627-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10098-026-03627-0

Keywords: ASEAN, embodied carbon, ecological network analysis, multi-regional input-output, carbon border adjustment, carbon metabolism, supply chain emissions, grid decarbonization, circular economy, carbon accounting, global value chains, climate policy