Decoupling Analysis and Socioeconomic Drivers of Environmental Pressure in China

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• 作者：Sai Liang ; Zhu Liu ; Douglas Crawford-Brown ; Yafei Wang ; Ming Xu
• 刊名：Environmental Science & Technology
• 出版年：2014
• 出版时间：January 21, 2014
• 年：2014
• 卷：48
• 期：2
• 页码：1103-1113
• 全文大小：705K
• ISSN：1520-5851

文摘

China鈥檚 unprecedented change offers a unique opportunity for uncovering relationships between economic growth and environmental pressure. Here we show the trajectories of China鈥檚 environmental pressure and reveal underlying socioeconomic drivers during 1992鈥?010. Mining and manufacturing industries are the main contributors to increasing environmental pressure from the producer perspective. Changes in urban household consumption, fixed capital formation, and exports are the main drivers from the consumer perspective. While absolute decoupling is not realized, China has in general achieved relative decoupling between economic growth and environmental pressure. China鈥檚 decoupling performance has four distinguishable periods, closely aligning with nation-wide major policy adjustments, which indicates significant impact of China鈥檚 national socioeconomic policies on its environmental pressure. Material intensity change is the main contributor to the mitigation of environmental pressure, except for ammonia nitrogen, solid wastes, aquatic Cu, and aquatic Zn. Production structure change is the largest contributor to mitigate ammonia nitrogen emissions, and final demand structure change is the largest contributor to mitigate emissions of solid wastes, aquatic Cu, and aquatic Zn. We observe materialization trends for China鈥檚 production structure and final demand structure during 2002鈥?007. Environmental sustainability can only be achieved by timely technology innovation and changes of production structure and consumption pattern.