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Over the past few decades, the pollutant emissions trading policies in China have undergone significant innovation and exploration. It is considered as a market-based approach that became integrated with command-and-control mechanisms such as total emissions control or pollution permits. This study is the first to provide systematic, reflective thinking that tracks the regional initiatives of pollutant emissions trading systems in China. In this article, we divided China's emissions trading practices into three stages and conducted a comparative qualitative analysis of the country's eleven provincial emissions trading pilots. We found that provincial pilots are highly diverse and complex regarding the pollutants that can be traded, the industrial sectors involved, the design of trading administration and processes, and the implementation of trading practices such as allowance, pricing and platforms. We also identified four main challenges: legislation setup, monitoring and verification, administrative interference, and the technical quantification of pollutant hotspots. We conclude the article by providing policy implications so that emissions trading policies can be integrated with the newly developed pollution permitting system., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Nitrogen oxides (NO x ) has become the priority of China's air pollution control, but the regional socio-economic factors responsible for NO x generation are embedded with spatial disparities, which leads to different effects of air quality policy at the local level. This study applied a geographically weighted regression (GWR) model to investigate the drivers of NO x generation from energy consumption (NGEC) in China's 30 provinces, to explore nonstationary spatial effects of NGEC. The results showed that population size has always been the dominant factor in spatial NGEC across all regions of China, although there is a minor north-south difference. However, the effect of per capita GDP and energy intensity leads to a significant north-south difference when they are influencing NGEC, which shows a minor west-east difference from thermal power generation (TE). We also found that in Northern and Northeast China, the transition towards cleaner energy structure based on natural gas has started correlating significantly with NO x generation through a weakly negative effect in 2015. Our findings show alternative strategies on NO x reduction, which include the spatially differentiated effect of regional socioeconomic factors on energy consumption., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

In this article the authors discuss the results of a study of the Chinese population in which many of those surveyed were concerned about urban air pollution or its health effects. The authors argue that despite the survey's results, ways to manage urban air quality through monitoring, information, and participatory approaches remains unresolved. Topics include the public perception about urban air quality and environmental information in China, the power of information, and social change.

Emissions of NOx, a precursor to several atmospheric pollutants, are a crucial aspect of air pollution in China, which is closely related to its booming economy and high energy consumption. However, few studies explore the economic structure factors on NOx emissions from energy consumption, especially the spatial heterogeneity of economic drivers. To bridge the knowledge gap, this study adopts a structural decomposition analysis (SDA) to quantify and map the contributions of six drivers of China's NOx emissions from energy consumption (NEEC) between 2007 and 2012, which represent economic scale, economic structure, and energy consumption patterns. For China as a whole, the final demand scale and energy intensity factors increased NEEC, whereas economic structure factors showed an inhibiting effect. However, the change in provincial NEEC due to the production structure and product mix of the final demand varied in a large interval. A negative production structure accompanying a positive final demand product mix led to NEEC growth in metropolises like Beijing and Shanghai. Provincial disparities were dramatic within economic regions in eastern China, including the northwest, north coast, east coast, and south coast regions. These findings indicate that spatially differentiated economic structure and economic growth diversely featured the driving mechanism on provincial NOx emissions, which should be generally considered to make the different regional reduction policies in the future. Image 1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]