Keeping the global consumption within the planetary boundaries.

The disparity in environmental impacts across different countries has been widely acknowledged. However, ascertaining the specific responsibility within the complex interactions of economies and consumption groups remains a challenging endeavour. Here, using an expenditure database that includes up to 201 consumption groups across 168 countries, we investigate the distribution of 6 environmental footprint indicators and assess the impact of specific consumption expenditures on planetary boundary transgressions.

Livestock sector can threaten planetary boundaries without regionally differentiated strategies.

The livestock sector represents major challenges to safeguarding environmental integrity. This study comprehensively analyzes ten environmental footprints of the livestock sector from 1995 to 2022, with projections until 2030, and juxtaposes them with the planetary boundaries. We quantify greenhouse gas emissions, land use, water use, particulate matter formation, and biochemical flows associated with the livestock sector.

Opportunities beyond net-zero CO for cost-effective greenhouse gas mitigation in China.

Achieving net-zero CO emissions is the current main focus of China's carbon neutrality goal. However, non-CO greenhouse gases (GHGs) are more powerful climate forcers, making their emission reduction an opportunity to rapidly mitigate future warming. Here, we evaluate non-CO mitigation potentials, costs and climate benefits in the context of China's carbon neutrality goals.

International Trade Reshapes the Decoupling of Emissions from Economic Growth.

Efforts to stabilize the global climate change while also continuing human development depend upon "decoupling" economic growth from fossil fuel CO emissions. However, evaluations of such decoupling have typically relied on production-based emissions, which do not account for emissions embodied in international trade. Yet international trade can greatly change emissions accounting and reshape the decoupling between emissions and economic growth.

Water consumption and biodiversity: Responses to global emergency events.

Given that it was a once-in-a-century emergency event, the confinement measures related to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused diverse disruptions and changes in life and work patterns. These changes significantly affected water consumption both during and after the pandemic, with direct and indirect consequences on biodiversity. However, there has been a lack of holistic evaluation of these responses.

Incorporating platinum circular economy into China's hydrogen pathways toward carbon neutrality.

Hydrogen is gaining tremendous traction in China as the fuel of the future to support the country's carbon neutrality ambition. Despite that hydrogen as fuel largely hinges on the supply of platinum (Pt), the dynamic interlinkage between Pt supply challenges, hydrogen development pathways, and climate targets in China has yet to be deeply analyzed. Here, we adopt an integrated assessment model to address this important concern and corresponding strategies for China.

Higher total energy costs strain the elderly, especially low-income, across 31 developed countries.

Addressing the total energy cost burden of elderly people is essential for designing equitable and effective energy policies, especially in responding to energy crisis in an aging society. It is due to the double impact of energy price hikes on households-through direct impact on fuel bills and indirect impact on the prices of goods and services consumed. However, while examining the household energy cost burden of the elderly, their indirect energy consumption and associated cost burden remain poorly understood.

Health-environment efficiency of diets shows nonlinear trends over 1990-2011.

Understanding the impacts of diets on health and the environment, as well as their association with socio-economic development, is key to operationalize and monitor food systems shifts. Here we propose a health-environment efficiency indicator defined as a ratio of health benefits and four key food-related environmental impacts (greenhouse gas emissions, scarcity-weighted water withdrawal, acidifying and eutrophying emissions) to assess how diets have performed in supporting healthy lives in relation to environmental pollution and resource consumption across 195 countries from 1990 to 2011. We find that the health-environment efficiency of each environmental input follows a nonlinear path along the Socio-Demographic Index gradient representing different development levels.

A net-zero emissions strategy for China's power sector using carbon-capture utilization and storage.

Decarbonized power systems are critical to mitigate climate change, yet methods to achieve a reliable and resilient near-zero power system are still under exploration. This study develops an hourly power system simulation model considering high-resolution geological constraints for carbon-capture-utilization-and-storage to explore the optimal solution for a reliable and resilient near-zero power system. This is applied to 31 provinces in China by simulating 10,450 scenarios combining different electricity storage durations and interprovincial transmission capacities, with various shares of abated fossil power with carbon-capture-utilization-and-storage.

Revealing Trade Potential for Reversing Regional Freshwater Boundary Exceedance.

Applying the planetary boundary for the freshwater framework at the regional level is important in supporting local water management but is subject to substantial uncertainty. Previous estimates have not fully investigated the potential of trade in mitigating regional freshwater boundary (RFB) exceedance. Here, we estimate RFB based on the average results of 15 different hydrological models to reduce uncertainty.

Implementation of carbon pricing in an aging world calls for targeted protection schemes.

Understanding the impact of climate fiscal policies on vulnerable groups is a prerequisite for equitable climate mitigation. However, there has been a lack of attention to the impacts of such policies on the elderly, especially the low-income elderly, in existing climate policy literature. Here, we quantify and compare the distributional impacts of carbon pricing on different age-income groups in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan and then on different age groups in other 28 developed countries.

Changes in global food consumption increase GHG emissions despite efficiency gains along global supply chains.

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions related to food consumption complement production-based or territorial accounts by capturing carbon leaked through trade. Here we evaluate global consumption-based food emissions between 2000 and 2019 and underlying drivers using a physical trade flow approach and structural decomposition analysis. In 2019, emissions throughout global food supply chains reached 30 ±9% of anthropogenic GHG emissions, largely triggered by beef and dairy consumption in rapidly developing countries-while per capita emissions in developed countries with a high percentage of animal-based food declined.

Large Virtual Transboundary Hazardous Waste Flows: The Case of China.

The Basel Convention and prior studies mainly focused on the physical transboundary movements of hazardous waste (transporting waste from one region to another for cheaper disposal). Here, we take China, the world's largest waste producer, as an example and reveal the virtual hazardous waste flows in trade (outsourcing waste by importing waste-intensive products) by developing a multiregional input-output model. Our model characterizes the impact of international trade between China and 140 economies and China's interprovincial trade on hazardous waste generated by 161,599 Chinese enterprises.

Allocating capital-associated CO emissions along the full lifespan of capital investments helps diffuse emission responsibility.

Capital assets such as machinery and infrastructure contribute substantially to CO emissions over their lifetime. Unique features of capital assets such as their long durability complicate the assignment of capital-associated CO emissions to final beneficiaries. Whereas conventional approaches allocate emissions required to produce capital assets to the year of formation, we propose an alternative perspective through allocating required emissions from the production of assets over their entire lifespans.

Impact of International Trade on the Carbon Intensity of Human Well-Being.

There has been a longstanding debate about the impact of international trade on the environment and human well-being, yet there is little known about such environment and human well-being trade-off. Here, we explore the effect of international trade on the carbon intensity of human well-being (CIWB) globally under the current global trade system and a hypothetical no-trade scenario. We found that between 1995 and 2015, CIWB of 41% of countries declined and 59% of countries increased, caused by international trade, and this resulted in a reduction of the global CIWB and a decline in CIWB inequality between countries.

Optimizing the rolling out plan of China's carbon market.

Although China has developed the world's largest carbon emissions trading scheme (ETS), there is no official documentation explaining how the current sectoral coverage plan was determined and what sectoral rollout plan is preferred. Here, we contribute to the policy development of the world's largest carbon market by suggesting a priority list of industries be covered in the ETS. We estimated marginal abatement cost curves using a database of more than two million firms covering over 500 four-digit industries that account for more than 97% of total industrial emissions, and simulating various carbon market scenarios including thermal power, 13 designated, and an additional 50 industries that have high emissions or are covered in other ETSs.

Emission growth and drivers in Mainland Southeast Asian countries.

Mainland Southeast Asian (MSEA) countries (Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar, and Vietnam) are likely to become one of the next hotspots for emission reduction, since CO emissions in this area will have a two-thirds increase by 2040 due to rapid economy growth and associated energy consumption. As one of the most vulnerable areas to climate change, MSEA countries need to develop low-carbon roadmaps based on accurate emission data. This study provides emission inventories for MSEA countries for 2010-2019, based on the IPCC territorial emission accounting approach , including emissions from five types of fuels (i.

City-level emission peak and drivers in China.

China is playing an increasing role in global climate change mitigation, and local authorities need more city-specific information on the emissions trends and patterns when designing low-carbon policies. This study provides the most comprehensive CO emission inventories of 287 Chinese cities from 2001 to 2019. The emission inventories are compiled for 47 economic sectors and include energy-related emissions for 17 types of fossil fuels and process-related emissions from cement production.

Contrasting suitability and ambition in regional carbon mitigation.

Substantially enhancing carbon mitigation ambition is a crucial step towards achieving the Paris climate goal. Yet this attempt is hampered by poor knowledge on the potential cost and benefit of emission mitigation for each emitter. Here we use a global economic model to assess the mitigation costs for 27 major emitting countries and regions, and further contrast the costs against the potential benefits of mitigation valued as avoided social cost of carbon and the mitigation ambition of each region.

Greenhouse gas emissions from municipal wastewater treatment facilities in China from 2006 to 2019.

Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) alleviate water pollution but also induce resource consumption and environmental impacts especially greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Mitigating GHG emissions of WWTPs can contribute to achieving carbon neutrality in China. But there is still a lack of a high-resolution and time-series GHG emission inventories of WWTPs in China.

Countermeasures against economic crisis from COVID-19 pandemic in China: An analysis of effectiveness and trade-offs.

The effectiveness of different countermeasures to economic crisis from the public health emergency is still inadequately understood. We establish an illustrative scenario, specifying the shocks of COVID-19 pandemic and countermeasures applying a general equilibrium model to analyze the effectiveness of countermeasures with a particular focus on trade-offs in the impacts of monetary and fiscal policies. We find that both monetary and fiscal countermeasures could effectively mitigate the economic damages to GDP and employment.

Shifts towards healthy diets in the US can reduce environmental impacts but would be unaffordable for poorer minorities.

Environmental implications of food choice are the focus of increasingly extensive research, but less is known about the impacts of dietary patterns of different socio-economic groups of a country, and the trade-offs between nutritional quality and environmental impacts of diet within those groups. We evaluate the impacts of US household dietary patterns on greenhouse gas emissions, blue water footprint, land use and energy consumption across supply chains using an environmentally extended input-output analysis. We compare the nutritional quality of these dietary patterns using healthy eating index scores across individuals' income and other socio-economic characteristics.