Prospects of industrial consumption embedded final emissions: a revision on Chinese household embodied industrial emissions

Sci Rep. 2020 Feb 4;10(1):1826. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-58814-w.

Abstract

The final demand embedded emissions are mainly estimated by considering the intermediate industrial production. However, the industrial consumption embedded emissions are not well investigated. This study estimates both the industrial production and consumption embedded emissions of Chinese households. Our results indicate significant differences between household industrial production and consumption embedded emissions. These different patterns are due to the different set of emission multipliers, Leontief inverse vectors, and final pull effects employed in embedding the intermediate carbon consumption to final demand. "Electricity, Steam, Hot water production and supply" was the largest source of both urban and rural household's industrial production embedded emissions. The largest amount of urban household's industrial consumption embedded emissions was from 'Miscellaneous intangible products'; while, for rural households it was 'Food and Tobacco'. Shandong had the highest industrial embedded emissions from both approaches; however, the main sources of its embedded production and consumption emissions were different. This embedding of the intermediate industrial consumption emissions to household final demand provides new insights, for mitigating the household embedded carbon consumption. The uncertainty analysis indicated that sectors with bigger output values show higher uncertainty, and the input quantities of emission intensity and final demand were the main contributors to outcome uncertainties.