Efficiency assessment of coal mine use and land restoration: Considering climate change and income differences

Abstract

Coal burning is still the main source of power generation in many Asian countries and is also the biggest cause of climate change. This research thus employs meta dynamic two-stage SBM (slack-based measure) under the exogenous model to examine 24 provinces in China as the research object. The first stage evaluates the efficiency of coal mining, taking employment in the coal industry and fixed assets in the mining industry as inputs, the development of non-oil and gas mineral resources a desirable output, and land damage as undesirable output and link. The second stage assesses the efficiency of land recovery, using land recovery funding as the input and recovery area as the output, and considers the climate change effect. The contribution herein is to discuss the degree of land destruction and the efficiency of land recovery through the different economic environments of different provinces and to divide the two groups by GDP. We also introduce high and low temperature days as exogenous variables to highlight the impact of climate change factors and to expose efficiency issues that may be underestimated. The results are as follows. (1) The efficiency value of the coal mining stage is higher than that of the land recovery stage, showing that China still pays more attention to economic benefits and ignores environmental responsibility issues. (2) More than 90% of China's provinces have coal mining expertise, but 70% of the provinces have low land recovery performance. (3) Eight provinces did not follow the Atmospheric Pollution Prevention Action Plan (APCP), the efficiency of coal mining deteriorated after the implementation of the policy. (4) Before the implementation of the APCP, land recovery in high GDP provinces was less efficient than in low GDP provinces. (5) Activating the APCP policy does not help technology upgrade. (6) The APCP policy caused the provinces to misevaluate their investments in fixed assets and misdirected their decisions on land recovery funding. However, the efficiency of land recovery after the implement of APCP was better. (7) Neglecting climatic factors causes serious errors in coal mine efficiency.