Confronting the Kaya identity with investment and capital stocks

The paper proposes an extended Kaya identity that incorporates investment and capital stocks to better analyze the transition to a low-carbon economy, addressing the limitations of traditional scaling relations in capturing existing capital legacies and new investment needs.

• Scaling relations like the IPAT equation and the Kaya identity are effective for estimating the magnitude of demographic, technological, and economic changes needed to lower environmental pressures, specifically greenhouse gas emissions in the case of the Kaya identity.
• Traditional IPAT and Kaya identities are insufficient for analyzing large-scale economic transformations, such as the shift to a low-carbon economy, because they do not account for the need for new investment or the legacy of existing capital.
• The author introduces an extended Kaya identity formulated as a sum of terms rather than a simple scaling relation, which enables the rapid exploration and analysis of various pathways toward a low-carbon economy.

APA

Stockholm Environment Institute (2012). Confronting the Kaya identity with investment and capital stocks. https://www.sei.org/publications/confronting-the-kaya-identity-with-investment-and-capital-stocks/

Chicago

Stockholm Environment Institute. Confronting the Kaya identity with investment and capital stocks. 2012. https://www.sei.org/publications/confronting-the-kaya-identity-with-investment-and-capital-stocks/.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=Stockholm Environment Institute |title=Confronting the Kaya identity with investment and capital stocks |date=10 January 2012 |url=https://www.sei.org/publications/confronting-the-kaya-identity-with-investment-and-capital-stocks/ |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{stockholmenvironmentinstitute2012confronting, author = {{Stockholm Environment Institute}}, title = {{Confronting the Kaya identity with investment and capital stocks}}, institution = {Stockholm Environment Institute}, year = {2012}, month = jan, url = {https://www.sei.org/publications/confronting-the-kaya-identity-with-investment-and-capital-stocks/}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }