The UK appears to be a leading country in curbing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Unlike many other developed countries, it has already met its Kyoto obligations and defined ambitious, legally binding targets for the future. Recently this achievement has been called into question as it ignores rapidly changing patterns of production and international trade. We use structural decomposition analysis (SDA) to investigate the drivers behind annual changes in CO2 emission from consumption in the UK between 1992 and 2004. In contrast with previous SDA-based studies, we apply the decomposition to a global, multiregional input?output model (MRIO), which accounts for UK imports from all regions and uses region-specific production structures and CO2 intensities. We find that improvements from