Abstract
Key targets of the sustainable development goals might be in contradiction to each other. For example, poverty alleviation may exacerbate air pollution by increasing production and associated emissions. This paper investigates the potential impacts of achieving different poverty eradication goals on typical air pollutants in China by capturing household consumption patterns for different income groups and locations, and linking it to China’s multi-regional input-output table and various scenarios. We find that ending extreme poverty, i.e. lifting people above the poverty line of USD 1.90 a day in 2011 purchasing power parity (PPP), increases China’s household emissions by only less than 0.6%. The contribution increases to 2.4%–4.4% when adopting the USD 3.20 PPP poverty line for lower-middle-income countries. Technical improvements in economic sectors can easily offset poverty-alleviation-induced emissions in both scenarios. Nevertheless, when moving all impoverished residents below the USD 5.50 PPP poverty line for upper-middle-income countries, household emissions in China would increase significantly by 18.5%–22.3%. Counteracting these additional emissions would require national emission intensity in production to decrease by 23.7% for SO2, 13.6% for NO x , 82.1% for PM2.5, and 58.0% for PM10. Required synergies between poverty alleviation and emission reduction call for changes in household lifestyles and production.
Highlights
Ending poverty is one of the overriding goals on the global development agenda [1]
We find that ending extreme poverty, i.e. lifting people above the poverty line of USD 1.90 a day in 2011 purchasing power parity (PPP), increases China’s household emissions by only less than 0.6%
Unequal household emissions Our results show that households are significant contributors to China’s atmospheric emissions, contributing 35.2% (9.5 million tons) of the country’s SO2 emissions, 30.5% (8.0 mt) of NOx, 47.1% (5.3 mt) of PM2.5, and 41.0% (6.5 mt) of PM10 in 2012
Summary
Ending poverty is one of the overriding goals on the global development agenda [1]. The first of the United Nation’s sustainable development goals (SDG1) proposes to eradicate extreme poverty (living on an income below the World Bank’s international poverty line of USD 1.90 a day) worldwide and to progressively reduce relative poverty (living in poverty according to the national situation) by 2030 [2]. The ensuing expansion in consumption is linked to increases in production, and associated resource consumption and air pollution endangering human health and welfare [3,4,5] This in turn has impacts on SDG3 ‘Ensure healthy lives and promote wellbeing for all’. China has successfully implemented poverty alleviation initiatives such as the Rural Minimum Living Standard Guarantee Program [11] and the Development-oriented Poverty Reduction Program [12] Those initiatives have lifted 868 million people out of extreme poverty from 1981 to 2016 and contributed 72% of the world’s total progress in eliminating poverty [8, 13]. National annual mean concentrations of PM2.5, still high, dropped significantly by about 30% from 2013 to 2017 [18, 19]
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