Modeling Study of Air Pollution Due to the Manufacture of Export Goods in China's Pearl River Delta

Abstract

The Pearl River Delta is a major manufacturing region on the south coast of China that produces more than $100 billion of goods annually for export to North America, Europe, and other parts of Asia. Considerable air pollution is caused by the manufacturing industries themselves and by the power plants, trucks, and ships that support them. We estimate that 10-40% of emissions of primary SO 2 , NO x , RSP, and VOC in the region are caused by exportrelated activities. Using the STEM-2K1 atmospheric transport model, we estimate that these emissions contribute 5-30% of the ambient concentrations of SO 2 , NO x , NO z , and VOC in the region. One reason that the exported goods are cheap and therefore attractive to consumers in developed countries is that emission controls are lacking or of low performance. We estimate that state-of-theart controls could be installed at an annualized cost of $0.3-3 billion, representing 0.3-3% of the value of the goods produced. We conclude that mitigation measures could be adopted without seriously affecting the prices of exported goods and would achieve considerable human health and other benefits in the form of reduced air pollutant concentrations in densely populated urban areas.

China's Growing CO2 EmissionsA Race between Increasing Consumption and Efficiency Gains

“…Surprisingly, net trade, measured as exports minus imports, contributed very little to changes in China's overall environmental impacts, though this may vary on a regional basis (40). There is a rough balance between CO2 emissions from the production of exports and emissions avoided by imports.…”

Upper-tropospheric CO and O<sub>3</sub> budget during the Asian summer monsoon

“…The global anthropogenic emissions are taken from the EDGAR v.4.1 inventory, which provides annual global emissions of greenhouse gases and ozone precursors on a 1 • × 1 • horizontal grid, but typically the anthropogenic emissions are overwritten by data from various regional inventories. For instance over Asia we use the detailed inventory from Streets et al (2006) (Price and Rind, 1994), rescaled with LIS-OTD climatology (Sauvage et al, 2007a;Murray et al, 2012) and are estimated at almost 6 Tg(N) year −1 (Martin et al, 2007).…”

“…The overlap between important CO sources and convection occurs primarily over the Indo-Gangetic Plain (IGP) according to Fig. 10, which displays anthropogenic CO emissions from the Streets inventory (Streets et al, 2006) and GEOS-5 upward convective mass fluxes. The impact of convective transport on the O 3 distribution is more complicated.…”

The contribution of Chinese exports to climate change

“…The low-cost of Chinese production does benefit most consumers, but this benefit comes at the detriment of both the local Chinese environment (Streets et al, 2006) and the global environment due to the effects of climate change. Cheap production in China could be globally beneficial in terms of the environment as well, though, particularly in driving down the costs of environmental products like energy-efficient lighting or wind turbines.…”