Consumption-based PM2.5 Emission Accounting of Beijing

Abstract

Beijing, the capital of China was severely affected by large scale haze in recent years. As the major contributor of haze, PM2.5 emission should be paid utmost attention. To respond to the call of PM2.5 emissions mitigation, an efficient accounting framework should be proposed. Traditional narrowly defined production-based inventory that consider the direct emissions from native energy consumption may generally lead to underestimates of the emissions derived from providing products and services. To comprehensively evaluate the supply-chain PM2.5 emissions of Beijing, by using the regional emission inventory and environmentally extended input–output framework, a consumption-based PM2.5 emission accounting model was employed in this study. The results show that PM2.5 emission from direct residential consumption still constitutes 44.48% of total emission in 2015 due to the combustion of coal in rural areas. Capital formation constitutes the largest proportion of consumption-based PM2.5 emission. It is expected that the study will bring new insights for PM2.5 emissions mitigation actions as well as enlarging the possibilities for future environmental policies for Beijing, or even other global cities fighting against the air pollution.