• Energy Research

Abstract Building sector is a significant contributor to the global warming and thus the control of carbon emissions from buildings has received unprecedented attention. While China is pioneering in including building sector in its Emission Trading System (ETS) pilots, there is few practical trading. This study investigates the reasons of lack trading via exploring a building owner's optimal strategy that is based on a multi-objective optimization model to achieve required carbon emissions reduction with minimal incremental costs. The investigated emissions reduction strategies include adopting low-carbon technologies, purchasing emission permits from ETS market, and non-compliance. A typical four-star hotel in Shenzhen, China is selected as an empirical case to validate the proposed model. The result shows that non-compliance is the preferable strategy by the owners, and there is no permits trading from the carbon market. Key influencing factors that affect the owners’ strategic choice are further investigated with various scenarios and it is found that the probability of government environmental inspection, the penalty for non-compliance, and an owner's reputation loss will to a large extent change an owner's strategy. These findings provide a quantitative rationale for policymakers to reformulate existing initiatives and mechanisms to invigorate the ETS market in the building sector.

This paper presents the findings of an expert working group of researchers from East Asian countries. The group was tasked with developing a theoretically sound and practically implementable methodology for assessing the sustainability of biomass utilisation in East Asian countries based on the needs and potential of biomass resources in this region. Building on six years of research conducted between 2007 and 2013, the working group formulated a set of main and secondary indicators for biomass utilisation under three pillars of sustainability. For the environmental pillar, the main indicator was life cycle greenhouse gas emissions and secondary indicators were water consumption and soil quality. For the economic pillar, the main indicator was total value added and secondary indicators were net profit, productivity, and net energy balance. For the social pillar, the main indicators were employment generation and access to modern energy, and the secondary indicator was the human development index. The application of the working group methodology and indicators in sustainability assessments of biomass utilisation will enable decision makers in East Asian countries to compare the sustainability of biomass utilisation options and to make decisions on whether or not to launch or sustain biomass utilisation initiatives.

Empirical studies on the effectiveness of workplace safety regulations are inconclusive. This study hypothesizes that the asynchronous effects of safety regulations occur because regulations need time to become effective. Safety regulations will work initially by reducing the most serious accidents, and later by improving overall safety performance.The hypothesis is tested by studying a provincial level aggregate panel dataset for China's coal industry using two different models with different sets of dependent variables: a fixed-effects model on mortality rate, which is defined as fatalities per 1,000 employees; and a negative binominal model on the annual number (frequency) of disastrous accidents.Safety regulations can reduce the frequency of disastrous accidents, but have not reduced mortality rate, which represents overall safety performance.Policy recommendations are made, including shifting production from small to large mines through industrial consolidation, improving the safety performance of large mines, addressing consequences of decentralization, and facilitating the implementation of regulations through carrying on institutional actions and supporting legislation.Until recently, about 4,000 coal miners perished annually in China, demonstrating that workplace safety in China's coal industry is an urgent and important issue. This research provides evidence that safety regulations have asynchronous effects and identifies the priorities in improving safety in China's current coal mining. This may assist the Chinese government to design more effective safety improvement policies and improve the effectiveness of safety regulations and safety performance.

Abstract This paper examines the endogenous evolution of household consumption patterns and household carbon emissions (HCEs) by integrating the analysis methods of income distribution with climate change. Based on a large-scale household survey spanning from 2012 to 2016 in China, we estimated the direct and indirect HCEs, observed inverse U-shaped Carbon Kuznets Curves (CKC) and significant changes in HCEs over the period at the household level. Applying the Oaxaca-Blinder method, we decomposed factors causing the changes in HCEs and found that income and demographic effects contribute only 25.1% to the total increase of HCEs. The other 74.9% remain unexplained and we define them as the effect of intertemporal lifestyle changes. Further analysis from multiple perspectives illustrates that the lifestyles of households across various social strata are becoming increasingly higher carbon-intensive over time even though the income remains unchanged. The findings indicate that existing modeling and projections of carbon emissions based on income and household characteristics may underestimate the future emissions pressure from the household sector. Hence, we conclude that in order to reach more meaningful results, the increasing effect of lifestyles should be taken into account when conducting climate change studies and formulating climate policies.

Cities' transition from fossil-based systems of energy production and consumption to renewable energy sources-the energy transition-is critical to mitigating climate change impact as cities' energy consumption and CO2 emissions account for two-thirds and over 70% of the world's total, respectively. Given cities' heterogeneity, they need specific low-carbon roadmaps instead of one-size-fits-all approaches. Here, we used an Energy Transition Index (ETI) to characterize the city-level energy transitions from energy system performance and transition readiness dimensions. The ETI scores for 282 cities in China revealed a significant heterogeneity across cities and over time, and the gap between the cities in the top and bottom quartiles was persistent. We estimated that China's energy and carbon intensity could decrease by 34% and 32%, respectively, and that carbon per capita could fall by 17% if each city modestly follows the sustainable development path forged by the best performing cities with similar economic structures.

AbstractThe existing studies of emissions reduction focus mainly on the technical potential and abatement costs while overlooking firms' willingness to pay (WTP) for emissions reduction. Yet WTP is a key parameter in a firm's decision to carry out emissions reduction while maximizing its profits. This paper estimates China's manufacturing industry (CMI) firms' maximum WTP for carbon abatement—defined as the cumulative product between the marginal abatement cost and corresponding abatement potential—using a large sample from a data envelopment analysis model. The results show that (a) the maximum WTP is significantly constrained by an isocost carbon abatement curve at RMB 8.65 million for the representative CMI firm; (b) the representative firms' WTP for carbon abatement varies among the sub‐sectors; and (c) profitability and production scales both positively affect firms' WTP for carbon abatement in all of CMI sub‐sectors, while innovation investment has a negative effect. The results suggest that the cost of carbon reduction technology for CMI firms should be below RMB 8.65 million for a representative CMI firm. The government should formulate subsidies or tax relief policies to help firms reduce their abatement costs. Further, the division of tasks in different sub‐sectors, between carbon emissions reduction on the one hand, and ongoing innovation on the other, should be clearly distinguished by policy bias to promote the transformation of industrial structure.