Integrating Sustainability Into City-level CO2 Accounting: Social Consumption Pattern and Income Distribution

Abstract

From a sustainability perspective, city-level CO2 emissions require reconsiderations. Correspondingly, the economy-environment-society nexus should be incorporated into city-scale CO2 accounting. Therefore, in this study, the semi-closed IO model is integrated with a HEM to calculate CO2 emissions arising from the social consumption pattern and income distribution, and to explore economic drivers behind CO2 variations. This method is applied to a case study of Beijing. Result demonstrate that Beijing in 2012 witnessed something different from that in 2005: (1) CO2 emissions centred in the internal linkages of a broader class of consumption terms with high economic output, mainly driven by interprovincial exports; (2) imports increasingly helped decarbonize the mixed, net forward and backward CO2 linkages of consumption items; and (3) income-driven CO2 emissions excluding demand-side parts persisted, which were more obvious on the supply side where households have more economy-wide effects. Besides, urban households played an essential role in household-wide CO2 reductions. This paper ended with corresponding conclusions, policy implications and directions for future work.