Abstract
Energy consumption in the residential sector is increasing rapidly in China. This study applies an integrated assessment model to investigate the adverse impacts of household energy consumption by various fuel types across rural and urban areas on age- and sex-specific premature deaths associated with PM2.5 pollution at provincial levels for 2015. We further estimate the economic and health co-benefits of a switch from solid fuels to electricity within households. We find that energy consumed by Chinese urban households is nearly 1.6 times than that of rural households. However, premature deaths due to household energy usage is 1.1 times higher in rural areas compared to urban areas due to direct use of coal for heating in rural households. The majority of household consumption-related premature deaths are predominately in the Southern area of China due to the population size and aging population. By replacing coal and biomass with electricity, this paper estimates economic benefits equal to 0.09% (95% CI: 0.08%–0.1%) GDP for rural areas and 0.006% (0.005%–0.007%) of GDP for urban areas of China. The results suggest that mitigation measures such as the promotion and subsidization of cleaner fuels, modern stove within rural households would yield these potential significant economic benefits.
Highlights
The residential sector is one of largest energy consumers in China (Fan et al 2013) and as such has a profound impact on the production activities, energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions (Liu et al 2011)
This study applies an integrated assessment model to investigate the adverse impacts of household energy consumption by various fuel types across rural and urban areas on age- and sex-specific premature deaths associated with PM2.5 pollution at provincial levels for 2015
Raw coal accounted for 34% of the total rural household energy consumption (1300 PJ), representing 2.8 times the amount of coal consumed by urban households
Summary
Tsinghua University, Beijing, People’s Republic of China 2 Geography, College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, United Kingdom 3 School of Economics and Management, Beihang University, Beijing, People’s Republic of China 4 International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxenburg, Austria 5 Faculty of Engineering Science, Department of Architecture, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium 6 Sustainability Division, Department of Technology, Management and Economics, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark 7 School of population and public health, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada 8 Department of Economics, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, United States of America 9 School of Economics, Minzu University of China, Beijing, People’s Republic of China ∗ Author to whom any correspondence should be addressed
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