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Whether China made efforts to decouple economic growth from CO2 emissions?-Production vs consumption perspective

Environmental Science and Pollution Research volume 27, pages 5138–5154 (2020)Cite this article

Abstract

Decoupling analysis is able to reveal the linkage between economic growth and environmental pressure. However, traditional studies mostly concentrate on production-based decoupling analysis and ignore the pressure emerging from supply chains to satisfy the final consumption. Through a comprehensive framework integrating input–output analysis, decomposition methods, and the Tapio index, this work may be considered the first attempt to explore whether China made efforts to decouple economic growth from CO2 emissions from production-based and consumption-based perspectives simultaneously. We found that (1) CO2 emissions in China expanded by around 1.6-fold during 2002–2015, of which Production and supply of electricity and heat and Construction contributed most to the production-based emissions (PBE) and consumption-based emissions (CBE), respectively; (2) Three-quarters of sectors presented weak decoupling or strong decoupling under both PBE and CBE perspectives, and Textile was the only sector achieving strong decoupling under both perspectives; (3) All sectors have made efforts to decouple economic growth from CO2 emissions under PBE perspective, while several sectors failed under CBE perspective. Overall, the decoupling status for PBE was better than that for CBE during the study period. Our results are able to provide targeted and effective references for allocating decoupling responsibilities between producers and final consumers more adequately and reasonably.

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Funding

This work wasasupported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71804166), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Nos. 2652017035, FRF-TP-19-005A1), and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (No. 2017M620851).

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Affiliations

  1. School of Economics and Management, China University of Geosciences, Beijing, 100083, China

    Lin Yang & Haodong Lv

  2. Key Laboratory on Resources and Environment Capacity under Ministry of Land and Resources of People’s Republic of China, Beijing, 100083, China

    Lin Yang

  3. School of Management and Economics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, China

    Yuantao Yang

  4. Victoria Energy Policy Centre, Victoria Institute of Strategic Economic Studies, The Institute for Sustainable Industries & Liveable Cities, Victoria University, Melbourne, Victoria, 3000, Australia

    Dong Wang

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  1. Lin Yang
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  2. Yuantao Yang
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Correspondence to Yuantao Yang.

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Highlights

• The decoupling status of PBE and CBE with economic growth are analyzed.

• Electricity and Construction contribute most to PBE and CBE, respectively.

• Change of economic structure, energy intensity, and emission intensity reduce CO2 emissions.

• All sectors make efforts to reduce CO2 emissions under production-based perspective.

• Some sectors fail to achieve decoupling progress under consumption-based perspective.

Responsible editor: Eyup Dogan

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Appendix. Sector classification

Appendix. Sector classification

Table 1 Sector classification of the Chinese economy
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Yang, L., Yang, Y., Lv, H. et al. Whether China made efforts to decouple economic growth from CO2 emissions?-Production vs consumption perspective. Environ Sci Pollut Res 27, 5138–5154 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-019-07317-x

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Keywords

  • Production-based emissions
  • Consumption-based emissions
  • Decoupling effort Economic growth
  • Decomposition analysis
  • China