A fine-scale atlas reveals the systematic imbalance between carbon emissions and economic benefits along value chain within China.

In efforts to achieve the aspiring carbon mitigation goals, China is actively seeking to reconcile the economic development and carbon reduction with diverse regional conditions. Here, we firstly integrated a national-wide atlas on the labor division of production, and decomposed value added and carbon emission along China's domestic value chain during 2007-2017. We found that the value chain roles lead to a systematic imbalance between value added and carbon emissions across regions. Over 70 % of sufferers of the inequality were located at the north, most of which were in the upstream position to supply resource and energy intermediate products of higher on-site emissions and relatively less value added in comparison to the downstream manufacturing and service products production at the coastal regions. As a result, the northern inland suffered a great deal while part of coastal regions and southern inland were beneficiaries in the participation in domestic value chain. In particular, several regions inevitably undertake industries with higher emission intensity and less gains in a sound domestic industrial chain. These strongly call for a systematically policy- or price-based mechanism to explore fair strategy for emission reduction.