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

• DOI: 10.1007/s11356-019-07317-x
• Publication Date: 2019-12-17T18:02:51Z
• Authors: Lin Yang; Yuantao Yang; Haodong Lv; Dong Wang
• Keywords: China; 1. No poverty; 02 engineering and technology; Carbon Dioxide; CO2 emissions; economic growth; 7. Clean energy; 12. Responsible consumption; decoupling; 13. Climate action; Institute for Sustainable Industries and Liveable Cities; 11. Sustainability; 8. Economic growth; 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; Economic Development; supply chains; 1402 Applied Economics

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.