Decoupling without outsourcing? How China's consumption-based CO2 emissions have plateaued

Zhifu Mi; Jiali Zheng; Fergus Green; Dabo Guan; Jing Meng; Kuishuang Feng; Xi Liang; Shouyang Wang

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2021.103130

Decoupling without outsourcing? How China's consumption-based CO₂ emissions have plateaued

iScience. 2021 Sep 14;24(10):103130. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2021.103130. eCollection 2021 Oct 22.

Authors

Zhifu Mi¹, Jiali Zheng^{2

3}, Fergus Green⁴, Dabo Guan^{1

5}, Jing Meng¹, Kuishuang Feng⁶, Xi Liang¹, Shouyang Wang³

Affiliations

¹ The Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction, University College London, London WC1E 7HB, UK.
² The School of Management, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an 710049, China.
³ Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China.
⁴ Department of Political Science, University College London, London WC1H 9QU, UK.
⁵ Department of Earth System Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100080, China.
⁶ Department of Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA.

Abstract

The shift of China's economy since 2013, dubbed the "new normal", has caused its production and consumption emissions to plateau, with the country seeming to embody the tantalizing promise of decoupling its economic growth from carbon emissions. By using multi-region input-output analysis, we find that China's relative decoupling in the new normal is technology driven, evidenced by the narrowing gap between its technology-adjusted and non-adjusted consumption emissions. By applying structural decomposition analysis, we further explore the driving forces behind the slowdown in China's imported emissions growth, finding that it is attributable to restructuring of import patterns resulting from changes in the structures of domestic demand. These changes could have been caused by China moving along the global value chain and rebalancing its industrial linkages toward trade in carbon-efficient goods to avoid transferring emissions-intensive production to other regions, indicating a shift to less emissions-intensive trade rather than pure outsourcing.

Keywords: Energy policy; Energy resources; Energy sustainability; Environmental science.