China's domestic industry redistribution facilitates carbon emissions mitigation

Zhuoying Zhang; Xiang Gao; Kailan Tian; Cuihong Yang; Shouyang Wang

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2023.106844

China's domestic industry redistribution facilitates carbon emissions mitigation

iScience. 2023 May 8;26(6):106844. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2023.106844. eCollection 2023 Jun 16.

Authors

Zhuoying Zhang¹, Xiang Gao², Kailan Tian², Cuihong Yang², Shouyang Wang²

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Tibetan Plateau Earth System, Environment and Resources (TPESER), Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China.
² Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China.

Abstract

Industry redistribution is a common economic phenomenon that involves a dynamic configuration of the production location across a region, country, or the world. However, measurements of the associated pollutant emission effects have not been well conducted at the domestically regional level. Here, we calculate the CO₂ emission changes induced by China's domestic inter-provincial industry redistribution during 2002-2017 using a counterfactual approach in the multi-regional input-output framework. We find that China's domestic industry redistribution decreased CO₂ emissions during 2002-2017 and has considerable potential to continuously mitigate CO₂ emissions in the future. We emphasize that the pollution haven effect may accompany the process of industry redistribution but can be weakened by effective policies, including stringent access thresholds in the regions undertaking industry relocation and regional industry structural upgrading. This paper provides policy recommendations for strengthening regional coordination to achieve China's transformation to carbon neutrality.

Keywords: Energy policy; Energy resources.