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We provide a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and GDP in China using both aggregate and provincial data. The Kuznets elasticity is about 0.6 for China, higher than that in advanced countries but below that of major emerging markets. The elasticity is somewhat lower for consumption-based emissions than for production-based emissions, providing mild evidence consistent with the “pollution haven” hypothesis. The Kuznets elasticity is much lower for the last three decades than for the three previous decades, suggesting a longer-term trend toward decoupling as China has become richer. Further evidence of this comes from provincial data: richer provinces tend to have smaller Kuznets elasticities than poorer ones. In addition to the trend relationship, we find that the Environmental Okun's Law holds in China.

Encouraging the use of public transit is key for developing more sustainable and resilient cities. However, transit users have to endure harsh and unpleasant conditions during their long waits for public transit. "More than Waiting for the Bus" is an ideas competition aimed at exploring ways to encourage citizens to use the bus all year long in Montreal and to make waiting for the bus more enjoyable by rethinking the sites surrounding various bus stops. This competition took place within "CoLLaboratoire", a broader interdisciplinary research project that can lead to scalable environmental solutions. More than 70 teams from about 20 countries participated in this competition. Additionally, the competition sought to constitute a “Best Practice Guide” that will include a synthesis of design principles submitted by each team. This paper aims to present the competition and its outcomes. It is focused on the design principles submitted which can help designers and planners of public transit systems, both locally and globally, to innovatively and practically improve the wait for transit and thus improving the quality of life of city dwellers on a daily basis. The design principles submitted by the competitors are presented, explored and analyzed according to categories, fitness and their frequency of occurrence.

More than40%of US grain is used for energy due to the Renewable Fuel Mandate (RFS). There are no studies of the global distributional consequences of this purely domestic policy. Using micro‐level survey data, we trace the effect of the RFS on world food prices and their impact on household level consumption and wage incomes in India. We first develop a partial equilibrium model to estimate the effect of the RFS on the price of selected food commodities—rice, wheat, corn, sugar, and meat and dairy, which together provide almost70%of Indian food calories. Our model predicts that world prices for these commodities rise by 8–16%due to the RFS. We estimate the price pass‐through to domestic Indian prices and the effect of the price shock on household welfare through consumption and wage incomes. Poor rural households suffer significant welfare losses due to higher prices of consumption goods, which are regressive. However, they benefit from a rise in wage incomes, mainly because most of them are employed in agriculture. Urban households also bear the higher cost of food, but do not see a concomitant rise in wages because only a small fraction of them work in food‐related industries. Welfare losses are greater among urban households. However, more poor people in India live in villages, so rural poverty impacts are larger in magnitude. We estimate that the mandate leads to about 25 million new poor: 21 million in rural and 4 million in the urban population.

Environmental performances have gained great prominence for firms in recent years. This paper examines the impact of corporate environmental information disclosure on the stock price crash risk based on a large sample of Chinese heavily polluting companies over the 2013-2019 period. We find that corporate environmental information disclosure reduces the stock price crash risk. The result holds after addressing potential concerns for endogeneity. Moreover, we analyze the mediating mechanisms and identify that operational transparency and investors' reactions work as mediators while information authenticity works as a suppressor. We also find that Internet attention strengthens the negative relation between environmental information disclosure and stock price crash risk. Our results demonstrate that corporate environmental disclosure plays a vital role in long-term sustainable development for heavily polluting companies.

The relationship between industrial structure (IS) and eco-efficiency (EE) is intricate with mutual influence and constraint. Exploring the coordinated relationship between IS and EE is beneficial to the sustainable development of ecologically fragile areas. This paper estimates and analyses the levels of EE and IS in 39 prefecture-level cities of the Loess Plateau, discussing the comprehensive and coordinated development levels between industrial structure rationalization (ISR) and EE, industrial structure advancement (ISA) and EE based on the coupling coordination degree model (CCDM). The results showed that the comprehensive development of the Loess Plateau has rough and imbalanced issues. The EE and IS are developing at a relatively low level, and the spatial distribution shows the development trend of high in the east and down in the west. The CCD of ISA and EE performs better than that of ISR and EE, but neither has reached the collaborative coupling state. The poor CCD score in the Loess Plateau is primarily attributable to its relatively backward degree of integrated EE and IS. The results are expected to provide decision-making support for EE improvement and industrial restructuring in the Loess Plateau and other ecologically fragile areas.

Whether China continues its current energy-intensive growth path or adopts a sustainable development prospect has significant implication for energy and climate governance. Building on a Ramsey-Cass-Koopmans growth model incorporating the mechanism of endogenous technological change and its interaction with fossil energy use and economic growth, this paper contributes to an economic exposition of China’s potential transition from an energy-intensive to an innovation-led growth path. We find that in China’s initial growth period the small amount of capital stock creates higher dynamic benefits of capital investment and incentives of capital stock accumulation rather than R&D-related innovation. Accumulation of energy-consuming capital stock along this non-innovation-led growth path thus leads to an intensive use of fossil energy - an energy-intensive growth pattern. To avoid this undesirable outcome, China’s social planner should consider locating a transition point to an innovation-led balanced growth path (BGP). When the growth dynamics reaches that transition point, China’s economy would embark on investment in physical capital and R&D simultaneously, and make a transition into the innovation-led BGP along which consumption, capital investment, and R&D have a balanced share. Also in this innovation-led BGP, consumption, physical capital stock, and knowledge stock all grow, fossil energy uses decline.

Abstract As a measure of building envelope performance, Overall Thermal Transfer Value (OTTV) has been regulated in many countries and regions in the world, while little research is done to evaluate its city-scale effect with energy consumption. In this paper, we develop an econometric energy epidemiology model to evaluate the impact of OTTV legislations on electricity consumption using Hong Kong as an example, as Hong Kong government is one of the first adopters of OTTV regulation. For this purpose, we construct a unique database on the energy consumption of residential and commercial buildings in Hong Kong, including 39092 buildings from 1982 to 2016. Noticeable contributions to the total building energy saving could be found from historical OTTV legislations by 2016. As predicted by the model, in 2030, the annual electricity reduction can reach approximately 20000TJ without further regulation amendment, which is an important support to the “HK3030” energy target.