The embodied flow of built-up land in China's interregional trade and its implications for regional carbon balance

Xiaowei Chuai, Runyi Gao, Xianjin Huang, Qinli Lu and Rongqin Zhao

Ecological Economics, 2021, vol. 184, issue C

Abstract: Built-up land intensively concentrates human activities, and its area or the changes in its intensity dramatically affect the regional carbon balance. This study proposed a new framework to assess how in China, the interregional trade's use of built-up land affects regional carbon balance with regard to the initial maintained land and the expanded built-up land. Then, a multiregional input−output model was used to simultaneously analyse China's built-up land flow in interregional trade and the effect on carbon balance. Finally, hidden regional inequality was analysed. The results show that the domestic trade pulled indirect external built-up land use reached to 100286 km2 in 2012 and caused 28084 × 104 t external province pulled carbon emissions for whole China, including 286 × 104 t from vegetation carbon storage loss. Regionally, more developed regions were always net receivers of built-up land use, in contrast, less developed regions more frequently acted as net suppliers, but most regions experienced economic and environmental deficits. The majority of other provinces experienced a contradictory status of loss of economic profit or environmental profit. For sustainable development and regional equality, more developed regions should provide more economic and technological support for effective built-up land use and emissions reduction to less developed regions.

Keywords: Built-up land; Carbon emissions; Carbon storage; Interregional trade; Input-output (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800921000513
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:184:y:2021:i:c:s0921800921000513

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2021.106993

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().