Abstract
International trade links countries consuming goods and services to those where products and related SO2 pollution are produced, thereby affecting national mitigation responsibilities. This study combined accounting and decomposition techniques to investigate the patterns and drivers of SO2 emissions embodied in international trade from 1995 to 2015 and quantified the contribution of each country or region on the production and consumption sides. The global embodied emissions increased at an accelerated rate before the global financial crisis and peaked at 51.3 Mt in 2008, followed by a fluctuating decline from 2008 to 2015. Spatially, the transfers of SO2 emissions tended to flow from developed countries to less developed ones, but the trend has weakened after the financial crisis. Our decomposition analysis suggests that the energy and production system transitions and the slowdown in international trade jointly accounted for the peak and decline in emissions. Our contribution analysis indicates that developing economies have contributed to decreased emissions due to their recent efforts in production technology upgrading, energy efficiency improvement and energy structure optimization. The influence of developed economies on emissions decreased due to their reduced dependency on imports. Targeted policy methods are provided from the production and consumption perspectives for developing and developed economies, respectively.
Highlights
This study investigated the patterns and drivers of the trends in the SO2 emissions embodied in international trade from 1995 to 2015
Some interesting findings have been revealed: First, the SO2 emissions embodied in international trade accounted for about 24%–30%
The global embodied emissions increased at an accelerated rate before the global financial crisis and peaked at 51.3 Mt in 2008, followed by a fluctuating decline from 2008 to 2015
Summary
GHG and have maintained an increasing trend, posing a serious threat to regional ecological, environmental and human health. Sulfur dioxide (SO2 ) is known to cause serious environmental issues, such as acid rain and fog-haze, and frequent SO2 exposure can induce cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, causing serious damage to human health [1]. Due to the growing population and accelerated urbanization in developing countries, as well as the accompanying improvement of living standards, the resulting pollution emissions (e.g., carbon dioxides, SO2 and nitrogen oxides) from these regions have grown at an alarming rate [2]. International trade separates countries consuming products from countries where products and related environmental pollutants are made. It is an urgent issue to investigate the patterns and drivers of the SO2 emissions embodied in international trade so as to provide
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