Elsevier

Journal of Cleaner Production

Volume 126, 10 July 2016, Pages 223-235
Journal of Cleaner Production

Balancing regional industrial development: analysis on regional disparity of China's industrial emissions and policy implications

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.02.145Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Regional disparity of industrial emissions in China was investigated.

  • Spatial analysis was integrated with Gini coefficient.

  • Regional inequity and compensation measures were discussed.

  • Regional oriented emission control policies were proposed.

Abstract

Efficient industrial emissions mitigation strategy is critical for China's national action on climate change and sustainable development, considering its rapid industrialization. Regional disparity brings difficulties and uncertainties to policy implementation in China. Therefore, an investigation on the regional features of industrial emissions is critical to better decision makings. While to date, related studies have been rather few. This paper applies a spatial analysis on regional features of China's industrial emissions (SO2, NOx and PM2.5 and CO2 emission) in 31 provinces. Spatial autocorrelation and regression analysis are firstly conducted to identify the regional emissions patterns. The regional disparity and inequity is further analyzed with Lorenz curve and Gini coefficient approach. Analytical results verify the regional cluster effects and the emissions' sensitivity to the economic and industrial development, and highlight not only disparity, but also inequity exists. It is concluded that, there is a larger unequal distribution of GDP per unit of air pollutants and CO2 emission between eastern and western regions, reveals that less developed western and central regions suffer from the emission leakage and an environmental inequity. Regional oriented mitigation strategies are required to balance regional disparity, so as to realize the industrial emission control policy under the “equity and efficiency” principle.

Introduction

It is well known that rapid industrialization is not only the engine for China's booming economy, but also the key driver of surging pollutants and CO2 emissions (Ren et al., 2012, Xu et al., 2014a, Yu et al., 2015). It was reported that the industrial CO2 emissions accounted for about 80% of China's total CO2 emissions in 2012, the top emitters included power sector, building material sector and iron and steel sector (Chen et al., 2014, Tian et al., 2014). As a result, effective and efficient mitigation actions on industrial sectors are critical for China's efforts on low–carbon transition and green growth (Lin and Wang, 2015, Ouyang and Lin, 2015, Wang and Wei, 2014, Xu et al., 2014b).

The central government of China has released a series of pollution control and mitigation policies to address the critical SO2 and NOx issues, and the emerging PM2.5 and CO2 emissions challenges (Schreifels et al., 2012), examples as: the “12th five year planning, 2011–2015”, in which aims to mitigate the SO2 and NOx emissions by 8% up to 2015 (Xu, 2011, Xu, 2013). Policy makers aim to reduce the CO2 emission per unit of GDP by 40–45% by the 2005 level by 2020 (Dong et al., 2015a, Dong et al., 2015b). Cleaner production and circular economy are key strategies to “green” the industries from technical perspective (Dong et al., 2013, Li et al., 2010).

However, compared with most developed countries, regional disparity, which is caused by imbalanced socioeconomic condition as well as physical geography (Dong et al., 2015a, Dong et al., 2015b, Kanada et al., 2013), brings difficulties and uncertainties to policy implementation in China. As presented in Fig. 1, vast disparity of economic development of each region makes China not be homogeneous entity, but a “small world” (Meng et al., 2011, Tang and Wu, 2011). Therefore, to implement the pollution control and emission mitigation policies fit to regional characteristics is critical (Dong et al., 2015b, Kanada et al., 2013). Local oriented best available implications are required under this condition.

To date, related studies have been rather few. The existing and limited studies focused on qualitative analysis and economic analysis on China's regional energy policies and emissions control policies (Chen and Groenewold, 2015, Huang and Todd, 2010, Sheng et al., 2014); interregional analysis on energy consumptions and emissions with input–output analysis (Li et al., 2014) and decomposition analysis (Li et al., 2016). In general, most studies focused on total emissions, but few special attention was paid to industries, considering data availability. Economic analysis, input–output model and decomposition analysis were most utilized, but few spatial analysis cases. Several research questions were still needed to answer: (1) compared with total emissions, what is the spatial patterns of China's regional industrial emissions? (2) How about the interaction between provinces and among different socioeconomic factors? (3) Is there any inequity issues, and if so, what is the corresponding policies implications?

In order to address the above research questions, this paper applies a spatial analysis on regional features of China's industrial emissions (SO2, NOx and PM2.5 and CO2 emission) in 31 provinces. This paper aims to contribute to fill the current research gap of China's regional energy policies in terms of: (1) based on our previous foundation (Dong and Liang, 2014), in which, regional emission inventory and spatial analysis approach was established, this research analyzes the industrial air pollutants and CO2 emissions in provincial level of China. (2) Spatial autocorrelation and regression analysis are applied to identify the regional emissions patterns and interactions between provinces and socioeconomic factors. This will be contribution to methodologies in this topic. (3) Regional disparity and inequity is further analyzed with Lorenz curve and Gini coefficient approach. Policy implications to compensate inequity are proposed and discussed.

The remainder of this research is: after this introduction part, Section 2 reviews the related studies and highlights the contribution of this research; Section 3 describes the methodology and data; Section 4 presents the analytical results and discussions; based on the results, Section 5 proposes and discusses the implications; and finally, Section 6 draws the conclusions.

Section snippets

Literature review

In general, studies on regional studies and implications of China's energy and emissions issues have attracted more and more attention in recent years (Sheng et al., 2014). The related and reported studies included but not limited to: qualitative analysis and policies discussion on China's energy supply-demand, and energy policies (Huang and Todd, 2010, Mischke and Xiong, 2015). In which, researchers addressed the existence of regional disparity and how it had impacts on energy consumption and

Research framework

To support to analysis above research questions, an integrated analytical framework is proposed, which is shown as Fig. 2. Regional inventory database is constructed with combined data sources, and Geographical Information System (GIS) is integrated as supporting tool for regional data collection and process. To investigate the emission pattern and correlation to various parameters, spatial correlation and regression model is applied. Meanwhile, Lorenz curve and the Gini coefficient analysis is

General condition of industrial emissions in China

Industrialization acts as engine of China's rapid economic growth and plays a key driver for China's surging increase of primary energy consumption and related emissions as well. Fig. 4 presents the national-wide energy flow analysis. In the period of 2006–2010, China's energy input was keep increasing, from 68830.16 × 103 TJ to 90147.78 × 103 TJ. In the end use side, industry is the key. Especially, process industries (e.g. iron and steel, cement, chemicals) consumed two thirds of the final

Implications

Significant regional disparity of industrial emissions in China is verified in above section, and various emission patterns are presented. Based on the results, this section proposes and discusses measures to mitigate the regional industrial emissions and overcome the negative impacts generated from it. Key implications include:

  • a.

    Technology & process innovations: basically, technology innovation and transfer is the foundation. Sustainable and clean technologies and processes are the foundation to

Conclusions

Regional analysis on China's energy implications and emissions mitigation policies is emerging field in academia and critical to policies makings. By integrating spatial correlation and regression model, Lorenz curve and Gini coefficient approach, this paper conducted an innovative study on investigating the regional disparity and inequity of China's provincial industrial air pollutants (SO2, NOx and PM2.5) and CO2 emissions in 2010. It was concluded that, eastern regions were hot spots for

Acknowledgment

This project is jointly funded by the project of “Smart Industrial Parks (SIPs) in China: towards Joint Design and Institutionalization” (No. 467-14-003) and the project from Ministry of Science & Technology, China (2015DFG62270); the Startup Foundation for Introducing Talent of NUIST (2243141501003-2015r003), the Shanghai Key Lab for Urban Ecological Processes and Eco-Restoration (UES2015A04), and the project of “Electric vehicle charging station pile Service Innovation Research and

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