About

Professor Giovanni Baiocchi is an applied environmental economist whose research focuses on the global and local impacts of economic activity, including trade, urbanization, diets, mobility, and lifestyles. He has published extensively in interdisciplinary international journals such as Science, Nature Climate Change, Nature Energy, Ecological Economics, Journal of Industrial Ecology, and Computational Economics. Baiocchi has contributed as a lead author for the IPCC 5th Assessment for Working Group III and as a contributor for the 6th, concentrating on drivers, trends, and mitigation of climate change. He serves as an Executive Editor of the Journal of Cleaner Production, which is ranked No. 1 in the category of Sustainable Development by Google Scholar Metrics. His project evaluations for the UN's IPCC cover topics such as living soils, biodiversity, regenerative viticulture, agroforestry, water management, and terrestrial carbon cycles, supporting early-career scientists from Least Developed Countries and Small Island Developing States.

Research topics

• Economics
• Computer Science
• Engineering
• Geography
• Transport engineering
• Agronomy
• Microeconomics
• Medicine
• Ecology
• Public economics
• Water resource management
• Advertising
• Natural resource economics
• Business
• Environmental economics
• Psychology
• Environmental science

Selected publications

• Assessing virtual water trade and inequalities in household water footprints across California’s counties

  Structural Change and Economic Dynamics · 2025-03-06 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access

  • Inter-county trade only mitigates water shortages in California's South Coast. • The Central Valley export significant virtual water via water-intensive crops. • Higher income groups have a larger per capita water footprint than lower ones. • Policies needed to combine geographic and socioeconomic factors in water saving. A bstract The concept of virtual water trade suggests water flows from water-rich to water-scarce regions, but local disparities are often overlooked. This study uses a multi-regional input-output (MRIO) model to assess virtual water transfers among California's 58 counties and the rest of the conterminous U.S. in 2017. Results show the Central Valley exported large volumes of virtual water via water-intensive crops (e.g., fruits and vegetables) but imported water embodied in industrial, mining, and thermoelectric processes. These imports eased water stress in the Central and South Coast but left Central Valley scarcity unresolved. Linking household consumption with MRIO reveals the highest-income group (US$200k+) had per capita water footprints 1.8 times larger than the lowest-income group (below US$15k). Although household size and consumption patterns mitigated this gap, Central Valley's high water intensity fueled excessive footprints. The study underscores the need for targeted, equitable water management policies, promoting more effective water conservation strategies.

  PublisherDOI

• Can U.S. multi-state climate mitigation agreements work? A perspective from embedded emission flows

  UNC Libraries · 2025-04-30

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Does interstate trade of agricultural products in the U.S. alleviate land and water stress?

  Journal of Environmental Management · 2024-02-28 · 7 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Health–environment efficiency of diets shows nonlinear trends over 1990–2011

  Nature Food · 2024-02-08 · 23 citations

  articleOpen access

  Understanding the impacts of diets on health and the environment, as well as their association with socio-economic development, is key to operationalize and monitor food systems shifts. Here we propose a health-environment efficiency indicator defined as a ratio of health benefits and four key food-related environmental impacts (greenhouse gas emissions, scarcity-weighted water withdrawal, acidifying and eutrophying emissions) to assess how diets have performed in supporting healthy lives in relation to environmental pollution and resource consumption across 195 countries from 1990 to 2011. We find that the health-environment efficiency of each environmental input follows a nonlinear path along the Socio-Demographic Index gradient representing different development levels. Health-environment efficiency first increases thanks to the elimination of child and maternal malnutrition through greater food supply, then decreases driven by additional environmental impacts from a shift to animal products, and finally shows a slow growth in some developed countries again as they shift towards healthier diets.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How broadband infrastructure development impacts green innovation? A corporate financialization mediated perspective

  Sustainable Development · 2024-06-01 · 20 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Digital technologies constitute a critical enabler for attaining a net zero target. However, how digital infrastructure, the material infrastructure that underpins digital technologies, shapes firms' green innovation remains uncertain. The uniqueness of this analysis lies in evaluating the causal implications of the Broadband China policy on corporate green innovation using a staggered difference‐in‐differences technique. Our study indicates that the Broadband China policy robustly boosts corporate green innovation. However, treatment impacts vary across calendar times, entry cohorts, and exposure durations, with most estimates exhibiting powerful and positive effects. Further analysis indicates that the Broadband China policy boosts green innovation indirectly through financialization by increasing corporate operating income and total asset turnover while minimizing management operating costs. The findings endorse that the corporate green innovation process requires more long‐term, stable, and continuous financial support due to its high information asymmetry, high‐risk nature, and long‐term investment cycle.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Efficiency of dietary sustainability and its global transition

  2023-02-22

  preprintOpen accessCorresponding

  Global diets consume tremendous natural resources while causing multiple environmental and health issues. As the world faces challenges of adequate nutrition security with concomitant climate and environmental crises requiring urgent action, policies need to improve the efficiency of devoting environmental input of the food systems for health benefits. Here we evaluate the global transition of such efficiency in the past two decades represented by health benefits obtained by per unit of 4 key environmental inputs (GHG emissions, stress-weighted water withdrawal, acidifying emissions, and eutrophying emissions) in 195 countries. We find that the efficiency of each environmental input follows an N-shaped curve along the Socio-Demographic Index (SDI) gradient representing different development levels. The efficiency first increases by benefiting from the eliminated stunting with a larger abundance of food supply, then decreases driven by climbing environmental impacts from a shift to animal products, and finally starts to slowly grow again as countries shift toward a healthier diet. Our efficiency indicator offers an improved understanding of nutritional transitions in terms of environmental impacts and a useful way to monitor the transition of dietary patterns, set up policy targets, and evaluate the effectiveness of specific interventions.

  PublisherDOI

• Drivers of Rising Agriculture Water Scarcity in China

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Carbon footprint of American lifestyles: a geodemographic segmentation approach

  Environmental Research Letters · 2022-05-11 · 20 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract In order to deliver substantial reductions of U.S. residential emissions, cost-effective responses to climate change will need to recognize changes in consumer behavior and lifestyles as important mechanisms to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions. Marketing experts have long recognized the usefulness of developing composite variables to target specific consumer lifestyles and have subsequently developed market segmentation approaches to express relationships between geodemographics and consumer behavior. This paper represents the first use of detailed segmentation data to look at US footprint at high spatial resolution. We employ market segmentation data to delineate lifestyles for approximately 70 000 census tracts in the US and develop a spatial framework to better conceptualize lifestyles as location specific typologies of emission drivers. We find that lifestyles are not only very useful in explaining variations in emissions but in fact are as important as income, typically recognized as the major determinant of consumption emissions. Results from our analysis link the differences between suburban and urban footprints directly to lifestyle patterns and illustrate the geographic distribution of emissions resulting from households’ consumption. We find that statistical clustering and consumer classification methods provide a unique perspective for understanding how various CO 2 drivers interact and impact household emissions. Our proposed framework suggests that carbon mitigation strategies should move beyond a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach centered on income and account for community specific lifestyle impacts related to consumer preferences and demographic characteristics at fine spatial scale.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Tracing toxic chemical releases embodied in U.S. interstate trade and their unequal distribution

  Environment International · 2022-12-06 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Toxic chemicals have severe impacts on ecosystem, climate change and human health, and the current toxic releases are inequitably distributed across regions. Investigating the toxic release embodied in final demand by states and income groups can reveal the responsibility transfer of different entities. In this paper, we extended the U.S. multi-regional input-output (MRIO) model with toxic chemical release data in 2017 to conduct the production- and consumption-based accounting of toxic release by each state, and the inter-regional transfer of embodied toxic release between states. In addition, this paper analyzed how the toxic releases and inter-state transfer of embodied toxic release have been driven by income groups across states. The results showed that the toxic release from production was highly concentrated on the central states and the Great Lakes Region, while the consumption-based accounting of toxic release was more equally distributed across regions in the US. The non-metallic and metallic products manufacturing sectors were the most important sectors for most states from both production and consumption-based perspectives and were also the most essential sectors for interregional flows of embodied toxic release from Great Lake Region to Southeast, Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. Our results also showed that the largest portion (41.88%) of embodied toxic releases were triggered by households' final demand, and that the consumption of the richest 35% of households contributed to more than 50% of the total toxic chemical releases triggered by total final demand of all households.

  PublisherDOI

• Analyzing the spatial determinants of dockless e-scooter & e-bike trips across four U.S. cities

  International Journal of Sustainable Transportation · 2022-09-16 · 22 citations

  articleSenior author

  In this study, we examine micromobility usage across four U.S. metropolitan areas, comprising over 3 million people. As micromobility increases in popularity and becomes incorporated in policies and city planning, it is important to understand how disadvantaged and underserved communities utilize shared micromobility options. Underserved communities typically have the lowest access to transportation options and thus, opportunities to jobs, health care, and food. While micromobility has the potential to increase opportunities in low-income areas, it is unclear how people in low-income and high minority areas use these options. Using publicly available API data, we analyze how e-scooters and e-bikes are employed in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Detroit, and Louisville. We find that the built environment had a strong impact on both the number of trips within a census block group (CBG) and the duration of those trips. Specifically, pedestrian-friendly intersections (e.g. low-speed roads, bicycle and pedestrian trails) generated more trips than automobile oriented facilities. Presence of fixed transportation and percentage of households with one or less cars had a strong and positive impact on the number of trips. The proportion of minorities and percentage of low-wage employment in a CBG are both negatively associated with trips in all four cities. The results suggest that existing efforts to promote shared micromobility usage in minority and low-income communities may not be sufficient. Designing pedestrian and bicycle-oriented streets, increasing public outreach and promoting access, and enforcing equity zones could increase shared micromobility usage in low-income and minority areas.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jan C. Minx

  University of Leeds

  43 shared

• Klaus Hubacek

  University of Groningen

  26 shared

• Laixiang Sun

  University of Maryland, College Park

  24 shared

• Felix Creutzig

  17 shared

• Kuishuang Feng

  University of Maryland, College Park

  17 shared

• Dabo Guan

  Tsinghua University

  15 shared

• Pan He

  Medical Research Council

  10 shared

• Max Callaghan

  Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change

  8 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Geography

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  1996

• M.A., Geography

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  1993

• B.A., Geography

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  1991

Awards & honors

• Lead author for the IPCC 5th Assessment for Working Group II…
• Contributor for the IPCC 6th Assessment
• Executive Editor of the Journal of Cleaner Production