It is of great significance to identify the critical influential factors of pollutant emissions for emission mitigation. However, city disparity implies different priorities for regional mitigation. This study aims to estimate the consumption-based emissions of 309 prefecture-level cities in China based on the multi-region input-output table and the sectoral NOx emission inventory and investigate the emission transfer phenomenon among cities and sectors. In addition, a geographically weighted regression method is used to analyze the spatial heterogeneity in the driving factors of regional consumption-based emissions. The results reveal that the top 10 cities in consumption-based emissions account for 25.2% of emissions and contribute 22.6% to GDP. The consumption-based emissions are mainly driven by local demand (72.79%) at the regional level and by construction activities (94.43%) at the sectoral level. Besides, the results also show the spatial variances in contributions of driving forces to consumption-based emissions. Economic growth has been identified as the most important factor which promotes consumption-based emissions. However, disposable personal income, per capita road area, urbanization, and percentage of tertiary industry GDP are conducive to reduce consumption-based emissions in some cities of China. It could be concluded that policies without consideration of the emissions from a consumption perspective are difficult to achieve effective emission reduction.
Keywords: Air pollutants; Consumption-based emissions; Geographically weighted regression (GWR); Multi-region input–output model (MRIO); Spatial heterogeneity.
© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.