Search

The commercial sector is one of the key sectors in China’s economic transformation and carbon emissions control. This paper applies VAR and STIRPAT models to investigate the major influencing factors of CO 2 emissions in China’s commercial sector over the period 1980–2014. According to the empirical results, per capita GDP, urbanization and energy structure have positive effects on CO 2 emissions while energy intensity has negative effect on CO 2 emissions in the long term. Besides, per capita GDP ranks as the most important driving factors of CO 2 in China’s commercial sector, followed by urbanization, energy structure and energy intensity in that order. This paper argues that reducing energy intensity and improving energy structure are the means to realize CO 2 emission reductions in the commercial sector in the short and long term, respectively. Besides, this paper forecasts that CO 2 emissions in China’s commercial sector will be 1942 Mt by 2030, which is huge and about half of the CO 2 emissions of the European Union in 2014. The findings have important implications for policy-makers to enact CO 2 emission reduction policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this letter, we respond to the articles “Decoupling global environmental pressure and economic growth: scenarios for energy use, materials use and carbon emissions” by Heinz Schandl et al. (Journal of Cleaner Production, 132, 45–56) and “Australia is ‘free to choose’ economic growth and falling environmental pressures” by Hatfield-Dodds et al. (Nature, 527, 49–53). The authors of these papers suggest that policy settings are crucial for Australia to allow growing standard of living to coincide with lower environmental pressure and impact. Both papers make it clear that decoupling has not occurred in past, but stress that this does not mean it cannot occur in the future. Here, we undertake a comprehensive trend analysis by putting their decoupling scenarios into a historical context to assess the feasibility of decoupling economic growth from environmental impacts. To this end, we undertake a structural decomposition analysis to examine the drivers of a change in Australia's greenhouse gas emissions from 1976 to 2050. Using the well-known I = PAT equation, we appraise the contribution of population growth, affluence and technology in accelerating or decelerating the growth of emissions over the 75 year period. Our results suggest that population growth and affluence are key accelerators of greenhouse gas emissions. We argue that in order to decrease emissions from fuel consumption, unprecedented improvements in emissions intensity will be required both in Australia and globally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The rapid economic development of China has intensified the country's environmental problems such as pollution and waste. As industry is the main contributor to environmental deterioration, the development mode of industry has attracted attention from the government and the public. In this paper, we have assumed that the industry is permitted a fixed total amount of pollution in order to avoid excessive pollution. If one province shows increased pollution, other provinces are required to reduce pollution by the same amount to maintain the total level of pollution. However, so far, few studies have considered such competition over outputs. This paper presents a new data envelopment analysis approach, which considers both the fixed and the variant sum desirable outputs in the performance improvement of a decision making unit, to evaluate the environmental efficiencies of China's industry from 2007 to 2011. The analysis results demonstrate that some economically developed provinces have better performance than less developed provinces; in particular, all efficient provinces are the developed ones. The Chinese government should focus on the increasing differences in environmental efficiencies among regions and take measures to address them. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The shift to markets based on servicising, i.e. market-level transitions from product-based to service-based production and consumption patterns, may contribute to achieve absolute decoupling, i.e. the combined development of economic growth and environmental impact reduction. However, the potential of this contribution is largely unknown. In this paper a generic agent-based model of servicising is presented with which this potential can be explored further, taking into account decision making procedures of business and consumer agents, including market research, preferences, and willingness to pay. The details of the servicising model are presented, and the model's abilities are demonstrated through three case studies from different sectors: car and bike sharing, crop protection, and domestic water-saving systems. Absolute decoupling was found to occur in some of the policy scenarios, but results vary widely between cases. It is concluded that the model can be used to explore the impact of public policy on the uptake of servicising and on absolute decoupling in various sectors, and is therefore a useful support tool for policy makers who aim to promote servicising, as well as for researchers studying potential servicising impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecological civilization construction has become one of the key strategies to address China's serious resource and environmental issues. However, how to define and how to assess ecological civilization ( EC ) are worth further exploring. This paper constructed a people-oriented EC indicator system, composed of a set of indicators, viz. Degree of Physiological Equilibrium ( DPE ), Degree of Psychological Imbalance ( DPI ), Degree of Imbalance of Human and Environment ( DIHE ), Degree of Human Development ( DHP ), Disharmony Degree of Economy and Environment ( DDEE ), and a composite index-Ecological Civilization Index (ECI), and then the indicator system was used to investigate the trends of China's EC construction during 1980–2010. Based on the reference year 1980, the study revealed that: (1) Physiological equilibrium of Chinese people has been slightly disturbed; (2) Psychological balance of Chinese people has been broken seriously; (3) The balance between human and environment has been destroyed greatly; (4) China has achieved great progress in promoting human development; (5) this country has improved the relationship between economy and environment obviously, despite that this improvement pace still falls behind speed of economic growth; and (6) China's EC level has declined during this study period. Therein, psychological problem and conflict between human and environment are the key obstacles to China's EC progress. China's government should further emphasize reform of its income distribution system and transformation of its economic development mode in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pursuing a responsible and sustainable development, the United Nations urged to decouple economic growth from environmental impacts. Several European Union (EU) policies have been implemented towards such goal. Although multiple authors have evaluated the decoupling of the economic growth from the resource use or environmental concerns, the environmental assessment mostly focused on pressures rather than impacts, and used single indicators assumed to be a proxy of the overall effects on the environment. Furthermore, no studies were found using a process-based life cycle approach to quantify the environmental impacts of consumption. To solve such research gap, this paper assesses the decoupling in the EU focusing on potential environmental impacts, complementing a production-based approach with two options for accounting for the impacts of consumption. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the decoupling of the economic growth (in terms of Gross Domestic Product) from the environmental impacts due to EU-28 consumption, assessed by means of life cycle assessment (LCA). The decoupling is then assessed in impact terms rather than limited to pressures by using the Environmental Footprint (EF2017) indicators, which allows assessing 16 different impacts. The Consumption Footprint indicator quantified the environmental impacts of EU apparent consumption, including the territorial impacts (Domestic Footprint) and the embodied impacts in both imports and exports (Trade Footprint). The inventory of pressures for the trade component is compiled either with a bottom-up approach (process-based LCA of representative traded goods) or a top-down approach (input-output-based LCA). Methodological aspects influencing the decoupling assessment and the resulting outputs are presented and discussed. According to the results, the environmental impacts of EU-28 consumption showed decoupling during the last decades (2005–2014), between relative to absolute decoupling depending on the inventory modeling approach taken. Some countries showed higher decoupling levels than others displaying a heterogeneous map of EU-28 decoupling, which was led by acidification, particulate matter, land use and eutrophication impacts. Notwithstanding current limitations, the assessment of decoupling using consumption-based environmental indicators is very promising for supporting policy-making towards addressing the actual impacts driven by the EU production and consumption system. • Comprehensive assessment of the decoupling of environmental impacts of EU-28 consumption from GDP. • A life cycle perspective is taken for the environmental impact modeling. • Decoupling assessment need further refinements to be used for policy support. • Top-down and bottom-up approaches indicated from relative to absolute decoupling. • Decoupling of environmental impacts from human development index is also evaluated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The implementation of Cleaner Production (CP) is a strategy for achieving a corporate's sustainable development and therefore is an important instrument for improving environmental performance. Due to the rapid economic development and urbanization in China, the stone processing industry is developing fast, resulting in several environmental problems. The stone processing sector has begun to implement the CP technologies and practices to tackle with environmental problems caused by the production process. However, the evaluation methodologies of the effectiveness of CP implementation in this sector have rarely been examined in the literature. This paper proposed a CP evaluation system that enables decision-makers to quantitatively evaluate the effectiveness of CP in the stone processing industry. A three-level framework was structured with 6 first-grade indicators and 24 sub-indicators according to the context and characteristics of the stone processing production. And the evaluation criteria were closely related to the laws, rules, regulations and discharge standards in China as well as the current CP technology level. Using analytical hierarchy process and fuzzy membership degree analysis, the weights of each indicators were determined, and evaluation results were achieved. Moreover, the evaluation methodology was verified to be reasonable and practical in the case study of a stone processing firm in Shandong Province. The entire and detailed assessment results demonstrate that the evaluation methodology is helpful in providing guidelines for the implementation of CP strategy in the industry of stone processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Air pollution has become a key problem to be solved in the process of sustainable development in China. Most existing research on environmental regulation has focused on one dimension or several aspects of environmental regulation. This paper quantitatively scored environmental policies in China from multiple dimensions to construct the index of environmental regulation and used a spatial econometric model and satellite-monitored PM2.5 data for 280 cities in 2002–2016 to analyze the effects of environmental regulation on city air pollution treatment in the country. The empirical results showed that (a) there was a significant positive correlation for the spatial distribution of air pollution in China (0.87 in 2007) and the current air pollution situation was susceptible to the effects of its previous (the time lag effect of urban air pollution in eastern China is the strongest, which was 0.347); (b) environmental regulation could significantly improve the air pollution situation in the cities of northern and eastern regions; (c) the decomposition of the spatial spillover effect confirmed the role of environmental regulation in improving air quality in the region or surrounding areas. (d) we found the inverted U-shaped relationship between city economic development and air pollution in southern cities, the environmental Kuznets curve was verified; In the future, breaking the "barriers" in pollution treatment between regions and strengthening regional conversation and cooperation are effective approaches to treating air pollution. [Display omitted] • We studied the environmental regulation impacts on city air pollution in China. • We quantitatively scored environmental policies from multiple dimensions. • The evolution of city air pollution and its spatial correlation were discussed. • The heterogeneity influence and its spatial spillover effect of environmental regulation were discussed. • The nonlinear relationship between economic development and environmental protection was revealed based on EKC hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]