Decoupling environmental pressures from economic growth based on emissions monetization: Case in Yunnan, China

Abstract

Under the rapid economic growth in China, environmental pollution has increased rapidly. Energy-saving and emission-reduction policies have been proposed in the government's Five-Year Plans (FYPs) to achieve sustainable development. Yunnan (YN) province, which is in its economic infancy, is facing industrial structure adjustment and is a typical case of severe environmental degradation. In this study, a decoupling analysis was conducted to explore the performances of economic growth and environmental pressure during the period from 2006 to 2016. The author of this paper made an innovative use of the pollutant discharge fee (PDF) as the measure of environmental pressure and Gross domestic product (GDP) as the measure of economic growth. The trend analysis and decoupling analysis revealed that although YN has already transformed from a weak decoupling to a strong decoupling state in the long term, stable and strong decoupling cannot be guaranteed. Moreover, there was consistency between the decoupling conditions and the FYP cycle, all of which indicated that there was a shift from the target emissions to non-target emissions during the 11th (2006–2010) and 12th (2011–2015) FYPs. Thus, a single index for evaluating pollutant emissions cannot be adopted effectively to achieve adequate pollutant emission reduction. In addition, three industrial structures were considered in the decoupling analysis, which indicated that the tertiary industry will be a new key area for emission reduction, and the emissions of secondary industries have also been reduced.