Abstract
Establishing policies for controlling water pollution through discharge permits creates the basis for emission permit trading. Allocating wastewater discharge permits is a prerequisite to initiating the market. Past research has focused on designing schemes to allocate discharge permits efficiently, but these schemes have ignored differences among regions in terms of emission history. This is unfortunate, as fairness may dictate that areas that have been allowed to pollute in the past will receive fewer permits in the future. Furthermore, the spatial scales of previously proposed schemes are not practical. In this article, we proposed an information entropy improved proportional allocation method, which considers differences in GDP, population, water resources, and emission history at province spatial resolution as a new way to allocate waste water emission permits. The allocation of chemical oxygen demand (COD) among 30 provinces in China is used to illustrate the proposed discharge permit distribution mechanism. In addition, we compared the pollution distribution permits obtained from the proposed allocation scheme with allocation techniques that do not consider historical pollution and with the already established country plan. Our results showed that taking into account emission history as a factor when allocating wastewater discharge permits results in a fair distribution of economic benefits.
Highlights
Total pollution load regulation controls total wastewater emission and can be used to control environmental quality [1]
Aiming to mitigate the above drawbacks, we proposed a new wastewater permit distribution mechanism that takes into account fairness by considering emission history at the provincial scale
Using historical data and the method we proposed, each index’s deviation coefficient was calculated, and the results are shown in Figure 2
Summary
Total pollution load regulation controls total wastewater emission and can be used to control environmental quality [1]. Such policies have been applied in developed countries such as United. Developing countries like China are experimenting with similar regulation. These schemes make the discharge permits a scarce resource. Each region desires to gain higher wastewater emission permits, since emission permits directly influences economic development [6,7]. The uneven distribution of wastewater discharge permits leads to the uneven distribution of economic benefits [8,9,10,11]
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