Urgently needed carbon emissions reductions might lead to strict command-and-control decarbonization strategies with potentially negative economic consequences. Analysing the entire firm-level production network of a European economy, we have explored how the worst outcomes of such approaches can be avoided. We compared the systemic relevance of every firm in Hungary with its annual CO₂ emissions to identify optimal emission-reducing strategies with a minimum of additional unemployment and economic losses. Setting specific reduction targets, we studied various decarbonization scenarios and quantified their economic consequences. We determined that for an emissions reduction of 20%, the most effective strategy leads to losses of about 2% of jobs and 2% of economic output. In contrast, a naive scenario targeting the largest emitters first results in 28% job losses and 33% output reduction for the same target. This demonstrates that it is possible to use firm-level production networks to design highly effective decarbonization strategies that practically preserve employment and economic output.

迫切需要的碳减排可能会导致严格的命令和控制脱碳战略，从而带来潜在的负面经济后果。通过分析欧洲经济的整个企业层面的生产网络，我们探讨了如何避免此类方法的最坏结果。我们将匈牙利每家公司的系统相关性与其年度CO ₂排放量进行了比较，以确定最佳的减排策略，同时将额外失业和经济损失降至最低。我们设定了具体的减排目标，研究了各种脱碳情景并量化了其经济后果。我们确定，要减少 20% 的排放量，最有效的策略会导致约 2% 的就业机会和 2% 的经济产出损失。相比之下，针对最大排放国的幼稚设想首先会导致同一目标损失 28% 的工作岗位和 33% 的产出减少。这表明可以利用企业层面的生产网络来设计高效的脱碳战略，从而切实保护就业和经济产出。