Abstract
Lacking systematic supply-use information of agricultural biomass and food products within China makes the existing provincial environmental pressure assessments (e.g., water consumption) either not detailed enough (e.g., by the input-output table-based approach) or not comprehensive enough (e.g., by the process-based approach). This study develops a symmetric inter-provincial multi-regional input-output (MRIO) model that hybridizes the physical food and agricultural biomass system with the monetary supply chain of China. First, we construct the inter-provincial supply, use, and input-output tables in physical units of 84 agriculture, food and forestry products. These physical supply/use/MRIO tables systematically capture agri-food product flows, at an unprecedented level of product detail, along domestic supply chains within China. Then we integrate the physical MRIO table of agri-food products into the monetary all-sector MRIO table to construct a symmetric hybrid MRIO table of China. The application of our hybrid MRIO model to the case of provincial blue water footprint assessments reveals that the hybrid model enhances both the monetary MRIO table-based approach and the process-based approach from different aspects. For instance, the hybrid MRIO model can reduce the uncertainty of monetary MRIO modeling due to the aggregation of products with different environmental properties into homogeneous sectors. Lastly, uncertainty analysis is implemented to quantify the main sources of uncertainties, and understand the reliability of our new hybrid MRIO model for future sustainable development design.
Highlights
China has been one of the largest consumption countries of agri cultural biomass and food products, because of its large population (The World Bank 2020), the meat-dominated diet of its in habitants (Liang et al, 2020), and the significant food waste (Li et al, 2016)
The demonstration of provincial water footprint assessment reveals that our hybrid multi-regional input-output (MRIO) model en hances both the traditional MRIO table-based approach and the processbased approach from different aspects (Table 1)
Compared with the traditional MRIO table-based approach, our hybrid MRIO model strengthens the process-based approach by capturing the whole supply chain-wide water consumption, which is the main limitation of the process-based approach (Feng et al, 2011)
Summary
China has been one of the largest consumption countries of agri cultural biomass and food products, because of its large population (The World Bank 2020), the meat-dominated (e.g., pork) diet of its in habitants (Liang et al, 2020), and the significant food waste (Li et al, 2016). China is one of the important global players in agricultural and food production and trade. China accounted for large shares, as an importer, of the global trade market for several agricultural and food products, e.g., 60% of soybean, 21% of sorghum, and 23% of pork (FAOSTAT 2020). Virtual water flows embodied in the trade of those key food products such as maize and pork within China have increased by 40% and 23%, respectively, over the period of 2000–2013 (Zhuo et al, 2019); the carbon emissions embodied in China’s exports have declined whereas the carbon transfer through inter-provincial trade in China has reversed since the global financial crisis (Mi et al, 2017); while the change in interprovincial trade structure has led to an increase of national average land use intensity during 1997–2012, with a results of 6.3 million hectares growth of land use (Chen et al, 2021). A comprehensive supply-use network of agricultural and food products that captures the produc tion, trade, intermediate uses, conversion processes, and final con sumption of associated products within China, to our best knowledge, has not been constructed yet
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