Greenhouse gas emissions embodied in the Mongolian economy and their driving forces

Shan Guo; Ping He; Munkhsoyol Bayaraa; Jiashuo Li

doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.136378

Greenhouse gas emissions embodied in the Mongolian economy and their driving forces

Sci Total Environ. 2020 Apr 20:714:136378. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.136378. Epub 2020 Jan 15.

Authors

Shan Guo¹, Ping He¹, Munkhsoyol Bayaraa², Jiashuo Li³

Affiliations

¹ School of Public Administration and Policy, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100872, PR China.
² School of Energy and Power Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, PR China.
³ Institute of Blue and Green Development, Shandong University, Weihai 264209, PR China. Electronic address: lijiashuo@sdu.edu.cn.

PMID: 32018942
DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.136378

Abstract

As a member of the Paris Climate Agreement, greenhouse gas (GHG) emission mitigation is a compulsory and urgent task for Mongolia. However, the Mongolian economy dominated by the carbon-intensive industries (such as mining and construction) has been experiencing rapid growth since 2 decades ago, consequently influencing its GHG emissions, while the impact of Mongolia's economic growth on GHG emissions and their socioeconomic driving factors remains poorly understood. Therefore, this study applied a multiregional input-output model to calculate the embodied GHG emissions and a structural decomposition analysis was used to identify the key driving factors of the embodied GHG emissions. Results show that the GHG emissions increased from 8679 Gg CO₂e to 17,165 Gg CO₂e, with an annual growth rate of 4.65% during 2000-2015. Household consumption and gross fixed capital formation are identified as the key driving factors for the increase in embodied GHG emissions, while technical efficiency is the main factor contributed to the emission decline in Mongolia. China, Russia, and South Korea were the top three regions to outsource their carbon emissions to Mongolia by international trade. Regional collaborative carbon emission mitigation strategies from the system embodiment perspective are suggested.

Keywords: Driving factors; Embodied greenhouse gas emissions; Mongolia; Multiregional input–output analysis.