Pursuing air pollutant co-benefits of CO 2 mitigation in China: A provincial leveled analysis

By Huijuan Dong, Hancheng Dai, Liang Dong, Tsuyoshi Fujita, Yong Geng, Zbigniew Klimont, Tsuyoshi Inoue, Shintaro Bunya, M. Fujii, Toshihiko Masui. 2015

248 citations recorded by the source corpus.

With fast economic development, industrialization and urbanization, China faces increasing pressures on carbon emission reduction, and especially on air pollutants (SO2, NOx, PM) reduction, particularly the notorious haze issue caused by air pollution in recent years. Pursuing co-benefits is an effective approach to simultaneously respond to both carbon and air pollutant problems. In this paper, the AIM/CGE (Asia–Pacific Integrated Assessment Model/Computational General Equilibrium) model and GAINS (Greenhouse Gas and Air Pollution Interactions and Synergies)-China model are combined together to project future CO2 and air pollutants emissions in China, as well as reduction costs and co-benefit effects. Considering implementation of carbon mitigation policy and air pollutant mitigation technologies, four scenarios (S1, S2, S3 and S4) are analyzed. Results indicate that by implementing both carbon and air pollutant mitigation (S4), CO2 emission per GDP can be reduced by 41% by 2020, compared with the 2005 level, and SO2, NOx and PM2.5 emissions would change by a factor 0.8, 1.26 and 1.0 of the 2005 level, respectively in 2030. The real co-benefits of emission reductions (S2 minus S4) for SO2, NOx and PM2.5 are 2.4Mt, 2.1Mt and 0.3Mt in 2020, and the corresponding cost reduction co-benefits are 4, 0.11, and 0.8billion €, respectively. Provincial disparity analysis reveals that regions with higher co-benefits are those with higher GDP such as Guangdong, Shandong and Jiangsu, energy production bases such as Inner Mongolia and Shanxi, low coal quality provinces such as Sichuan (for SO2), and industrial base provinces such as Liaoning. Cost-effectiveness is finally discussed for policy implications, which suggests that investment in less developed western regions is more cost-effective and easier in reducing CO2 or air pollutant emissions than in developed eastern regions.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Environmental Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/47d5024ac66ad2c7a454959dca4a8c7bcba6f9f7

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Citations in the corpus

Will COVID-19 fiscal recovery packages accelerate or retard progress on climate change? (2020, background): “, 2020) often include reduced waste and inefficiency, pollution (Dong et al., 2015; Bollen, 2015), congestion (Portugal-Pereira et al.”
Potential co-benefits of electrification for air quality, health, and CO2 mitigation in 2030 China (2018, background): “Prior research has found various strategies that are potentially beneficial for both objectives, including reducing final energy use [7], improving industrial energy efficiency [4,9–11], curbing coal combustion [4,12,13], and increasing renewable energy use [5].”
Distributional effects of carbon taxation (2016, background): “However, it is worth to note that a few recent studies began to pay attention to qualifying the uneven distribution of the environmental cobenefit of carbon mitigation across regions/provinces [96,97], but a more detailed level of assessment across various income or other socio-economic groups is st”
Impacts of carbon trading scheme on air pollutant emissions in Guangdong Province of China (2015, methodology): “…have focused on the co-benefits of carbon mitigation measures induced air pollutant reduction in China (Aunan et al., 2004; Jiang et al., 2013; Dong et al., 2015), co-benefits of energy saving entail reductions in air pollution and the improvement of public health (Chen et al., 2007),…”