Why Are the Carbon Footprints of China’s Urban Households Rising? An Input–Output Analysis and Structural Decomposition Analysis

Abstract

A rise in China's economy and urbanization has brought about obvious growth in the carbon footprints of urban households over the past years. In this study, input-output analysis was adopted to calculate the carbon footprints of urban households in China. Furthermore, a detailed analysis of the impact factors on indirect carbon footprints was carried out by using the structural decomposition analysis at both holistic and sectoral levels. The results showed that the carbon footprints of urban households were 941.37 MtCO 2 in 2002 , 1498 .11 MtCO 2 in 2007 , and 2139 MtCO 2 in 2012. Electricity was the main contributor to the direct urban household carbon footprints, accounting for over 40%. The category of "household facilities" contributed the most to indirect carbon footprints (306.00 MtCO 2 ) in 2012, and the "transportation" had the fastest growth rate (395%) during 2002-2012. The industrial sector of "wearing apparel" had the largest increments (139.92 MtCO 2 ) in carbon footprints during the past decade. Generally, consumption level and population size presented positive effects on the increments in indirect carbon footprints, while emission intensity decreased indirect carbon footprints. However, the impact of consumption structure and intermediate demand on indirect carbon footprints varied at holistic and sectoral levels. The mitigation efforts should focus on reducing emission intensity, shifting consumption structure and changing intermediate demand.Sustainability 2019, 11, 7157 2 of 18 allocation was more than 40% for China [16]. However, as the largest developing country, China has experienced fast urbanization during the last two decades, leading to a spike in household energy requirements [17][18][19]. Moreover, along with the improvement of income level and the changes in consumers' lifestyle, the Chinese households generally spent more money on enhancing the quality of life, such as enjoying luxurious consumption (such as overseas traveling and air conditioning) and purchasing high-carbon products (such as private cars with high gasoline consumption and home appliances with high power) [20,21]. In addition, the increasingly fast urbanization process also has a significant impact on household carbon emissions. China's urbanization rate increased from 18% in 1978 to 58% in 2017. Compared to rural households, urban households' carbon emissions are much larger because of the higher income level and modern lifestyle [22][23][24][25]. It is noteworthy that China is still accelerating the development of urbanization. One hundred million rural populations will be settled in urban areas by 2020. The urbanization rate will reach 60% by 2020 and 70% by 2030. With intensified rural-to-urban migration, the impact of urban residents on the carbon emissions will be further magnified. The research on carbon emissions of China's urban households should draw widespread attention [26][27][28]. The concept of carbon footprint is widely applied to identify both direct and indirect carbon emissions from a broader accou...

Is it acceptable to have a child? Revealing Chinese household carbon footprints from a demographic perspective using the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) model

“…To avoid uncertainty in the homogeneity of products or services, a highly detailed input-output table is key. In our previous studies, we estimated the urban indirect household carbon footprint in 2002, 2007, and 2012 based on a detailed input-output table (Liu et al, 2019). The difference ratio of urban indirect carbon footprint between results in this paper and our previous study is below 4%.…”

“…Previous studies have used input-output analysis, lifecycle assessment, or the consumer lifestyle approach to calculate the carbon footprint in different temporalspatial scales (Rama et al, 2021;Zhang et al, 2020). Other studies have reported on household carbon footprints from the perspectives of energy, supply chains, and income, among other factors (Fan et al, 2012;Liu et al, 2019;Sommer & Kratena, 2017;Thapar, 2020). Yet, research evaluating the impact of demographic factors, including age and gender, on the household carbon footprints are currently lacking, which would be useful to explore how to reduce carbon emissions via policies aimed at different age or gender groups at the microscale, as well as predicting the total carbon footprint with shifting age demographics at the macroscale.…”

Peaking Industrial CO2 Emission in a Typical Heavy Industrial Region: From Multi-Industry and Multi-Energy Type Perspectives

“…China has pledged to peak CO 2 emissions by 2030. From a regional perspective, CO 2 emissions on the consumer side are mainly concentrated in the industrial sector, construction sector, transportation sector and urban household sector [6][7][8]. The industrial sector is the largest contributor to China's CO 2 emissions.…”