China’s embodied environmental impact on the Global Commons through provincial and spillover perspectives

Abstract

Existing benchmarks for assessing China’s environmental progress ignore the important issue of transboundary impacts and also lack systematic methods that focus on China’s subnational level. By using techniques based on a multiregion input–output model, we develop a new framework, China’s Subnational-level Global Commons Stewardship (CS-GCS) index system. This framework summarizes multiple Global Commons domains into a comprehensive assessment, to synergistically track the embodied environmental impacts and score trajectories across China from both provincial and spillover perspectives. We find that, although China’s developing provinces perform better, developed provinces made more significant improvements from 2007 to 2015. There is no significant trend of increase in China’s outsourcing of environmental impacts to other countries over this period. However, there is still a disproportionate environmental responsibility for the Global Commons between regions, particularly the outsourcing of impacts from the eastern coast to the northern hinterland. Of these, the impact embodied in interprovincial trade is two to seven times greater than international trade, which will further dominate China’s environmental impacts. Agriculture is the crucial sectoral driver in all environmental domains. Our study serves as a method of helping assess and coordinate subnational efforts in China and prioritize environmental action.