Abstract
Global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions can be traced to five economic sectors: energy, industry, buildings, transport and AFOLU (agriculture, forestry and other land uses). In this topical ...review, we synthesise the literature to explain recent trends in global and regional emissions in each of these sectors. To contextualise our review, we present estimates of GHG emissions trends by sector from 1990 to 2018, describing the major sources of emissions growth, stability and decline across ten global regions. Overall, the literature and data emphasise that progress towards reducing GHG emissions has been limited. The prominent global pattern is a continuation of underlying drivers with few signs of emerging limits to demand, nor of a deep shift towards the delivery of low and zero carbon services across sectors. We observe a moderate decarbonisation of energy systems in Europe and North America, driven by fuel switching and the increasing penetration of renewables. By contrast, in rapidly industrialising regions, fossil-based energy systems have continuously expanded, only very recently slowing down in their growth. Strong demand for materials, floor area, energy services and travel have driven emissions growth in the industry, buildings and transport sectors, particularly in Eastern Asia, Southern Asia and South-East Asia. An expansion of agriculture into carbon-dense tropical forest areas has driven recent increases in AFOLU emissions in Latin America, South-East Asia and Africa. Identifying, understanding, and tackling the most persistent and climate-damaging trends across sectors is a fundamental concern for research and policy as humanity treads deeper into the Anthropocene.
•Sub-national institutions impact foreign firm performance.•Firm age moderates the relationship between sub-national institutions and firm performance.•Joint venture mitigates the negative impact of ...sub-national institutional constraints on foreign firm performance.
This paper examines the impact of sub-national institutions on the performance of foreign firms in China. Building on institutional theory, we envisage that the negative effect of sub-national institutional constraints is moderated by firm size and age, entry mode, and market orientation. Our hypotheses are tested on a large-firm-level dataset of about 29,000 foreign firms in 120 cities in China within the period of 1999–2005. We find that firm size and age both have a diminishing positive impact on foreign firm performance; moreover, there is a U-shaped relationship between firm age and foreign firm performance in cities with higher level institutional constraints. We also find that joint ventures help mitigate the negative impact of sub-national institutional constraints on foreign firm performance when the level of institutional constraints is higher.
•The production of TCR is unequally distributed across regions.•Net importers of embodied TCR are mainly focused on the east and west coastal areas.•The non-metallic and metallic products sectors are ...the most important sectors.•The largest portion of embodied TCR were triggered by households’ final demand.•High-income groups account for high percent of total TCR footprint.
Toxic chemicals have severe impacts on ecosystem, climate change and human health, and the current toxic releases are inequitably distributed across regions. Investigating the toxic release embodied in final demand by states and income groups can reveal the responsibility transfer of different entities. In this paper, we extended the U.S. multi-regional input–output (MRIO) model with toxic chemical release data in 2017 to conduct the production- and consumption-based accounting of toxic release by each state, and the inter-regional transfer of embodied toxic release between states. In addition, this paper analyzed how the toxic releases and inter-state transfer of embodied toxic release have been driven by income groups across states. The results showed that the toxic release from production was highly concentrated on the central states and the Great Lakes Region, while the consumption-based accounting of toxic release was more equally distributed across regions in the US. The non-metallic and metallic products manufacturing sectors were the most important sectors for most states from both production and consumption-based perspectives and were also the most essential sectors for interregional flows of embodied toxic release from Great Lake Region to Southeast, Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. Our results also showed that the largest portion (41.88%) of embodied toxic releases were triggered by households’ final demand, and that the consumption of the richest 35% of households contributed to more than 50% of the total toxic chemical releases triggered by total final demand of all households.
Although research has shown that countries' world-systems positions can predict levels of pollution and wealth, there has been little research looking at how consumption in the core triggers both ...pollution and wealth elsewhere in the world economy. In this article, we track how consumption in the United States, a core country, triggers value added and pollution throughout global commodity chains. We track these distributions for all commodities and services consumed in the United States, then for six commodity groupings, and finally for two case studies, "Motor Vehicles" and "Wearing Apparel." Our findings show how the production of commodities for US consumption tends to reify inequalities in the world-system: Larger shares of value added (in comparison to shares of pollution) are generally prompted within the core, whereas the opposite effect tends to be experienced in the non-core. We also discuss interesting exceptions to these general trends occurring at different levels of analysis. Finally, we draw special attention to China, the elephant in the room that exhibits both core and peripheral characteristics.
Summary
Rapid economic growth and urbanization in China have led to a substantial change in consumption patterns and diet structure of Chinese consumers over the past few decades. A growing demand ...for feed, fuel, and fiber also places intense pressure on land resources. With continuing growth of China's economy and migration from rural to urban, the increase in food consumption and change in diet structure will likely continue, which will not only impose pressure on domestic land resources, but also exert impact on land resources in other countries through import. This article applies a global multiregion input‐output (MRIO) model to trace agricultural land use along global supply chains and examines the impact of China's future food consumption on global land use in 2030 against different socioeconomic and technological scenarios. Our scenarios show that by 2030, China would need an additional 21% of cropland to support its increasing food demand, driven by population growth, urbanization, and income growth and the associated diet structure change. Almost one third of cropland associated with household consumption (34 million hectares Mha) will be “outsourced” to foreign countries, such as Argentina, Brazil, the United States, and Thailand, for the consumption of cereal grains, soybeans, and paddy rice. China also consumes 2.4 Mha of cropland from Africa for its consumption of cereal grains and oil seeds. The dependence of domestic consumption on significant amounts of foreign cropland shows that China would face serious challenges to meet its grain self‐sufficiency policy in the future, and, at the same time, this dependence would contribute to environmental and food security problems elsewhere.
China, like many other countries, is promoting the development of liquid biofuel, including bioethanol and biodiesel. The Chinese government has set biofuel development targets for the coming decade ...and sanctioned a series of supportive policies. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of current liquid biofuel development in China, related government policies, and the potential opportunities and challenges for its future expansion. Our assessment is based on two rounds of in-depth fieldwork and a thorough literature review. The assessment shows that the prevailing concern on food security has pushed China to move from cereal-based to non-cereal-based biofuel production. Emphasis has also been put on utilizing new marginal land for feedstock production. Our assessment indicates that the targets of China's biofuel development are cautious and feasible, but on the other hand there are still severe challenges for the sustainability of such development. A better understanding of China's experience in striking a balance between energy security, food security and environmental protection would inform the debates across country boundaries and contribute to the efforts for global sustainability.
Abstract
Indonesia has been the largest supplier of palm oil since 2007, and now supplies around 56% of the global market. While the existing literature has paid serious attention to the diverse ...impacts of oil palm plantation on socioeconomic factors and the environment, less is known about the joint role of biophysical and socioeconomic factors in shaping the temporal and spatial dynamics of oil palm expansion. This research investigates how the benefits and costs of converting other land use/ land cover (LULC) types to oil palm plantation affects these expansion patterns. We employ a spatial panel modeling approach to assess the contributions of biophysical and socioeconomic driving factors. Our modeling focuses on Sumatra and Kalimantan, two islands which have accounted for more than 90% of oil palm expansion in Indonesia since 1990, with Sumatra holding the majority of the country’s plantations, and Kalimantan having the highest growth rate since 2000. The results show that the expansion in Kalimantan, which has been strongly stimulated by the export value of palm oil products, has occurred in areas with better biophysical suitability and infrastructure accessibility, following the ‘pecking order’ sequence, whereby more productive areas are already occupied by existing agriculture and plantations, and avoiding areas with high environmental values or socioeconomic costs. As demand for palm oil continues to grow, and land resources become more limited, the expansion in Kalimantan will tend towards the dynamics observed in Sumatra, with plantation expanding into remote and fertile areas with high conversion costs or legal barriers. Bare ground seems to have served as a clearing-up tactic to meet the procedural requirements of oil palm plantation for sustainable development. This research facilitates the improved projection of potential areas liable to future expansion, and the development of strategies to manage the leading drivers of LULC in Indonesia.
Land-use change is increasingly driven by global trade. The term “telecoupling” has been gaining ground as a means to describe how human actions in one part of the world can have spatially distant ...impacts on land and land-use in another. These interactions can, over time, create both direct and spatially distant feedback loops, in which human activity and land use mutually impact one another over great expanses. In this paper, we develop an analytical framework to clarify spatially distant feedbacks in the case of land use and global trade. We use an innovative mix of multi-regional input-output (MRIO) analysis and stochastic actor-oriented models (SAOMs) for analyzing the co-evolution of changes in trade network patterns with those of land use, as embodied in trade. Our results indicate that the formation of trade ties and changes in embodied land use mutually impact one another, and further, that these changes are linked to disparities in countries' wealth. Through identifying this feedback loop, our results support ongoing discussions about the unequal trade patterns between rich and poor countries that result in uneven distributions of negative environmental impacts. Finally, evidence for this feedback loop is present even when controlling for a number of underlying mechanisms, such as countries' land endowments, their geographical distance from one another, and a number of endogenous network tendencies.
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•Spatially distant feedbacks are identified for global trade and land-use.•Data shows these feedback loops over a 10year time span (2000−2010).•Poorer countries exporting to wealthier ones increase their Land Trade Imbalance.•Net exporters of land tend to form strong export ties with wealthier countries.
Protected areas (PAs) have been regarded as a critical strategy to protect natural forest (NF) and biodiversity. Estate‐crop expansion is an important driver of deforestation in Indonesia. Yet, ...little is known regarding the temporal dynamics of PA effectiveness in preventing estate‐crop expansion into NF. We employ Cox proportional hazard models and their extensions to characterize the dynamics of estate‐crop expansion into NF in Indonesia during 1996–2015. The results show that PA effectiveness in Sumatra decreased over time and became insignificant in 2012–2015. A multistate modeling analysis shows that hopping in land‐cover and land‐use change (LCLUC) trajectories with shrub and/or bare ground as intermediates has decreased PA effectiveness and facilitated the expansion. Preventing LCLUC trajectory hopping becomes crucial to biodiversity conservation because it tends to occur at lowland forest, diminishing natural habitat area and increasing NF isolation.
In this paper, we investigate the agronomic and economic impact of cultivating seeds of improved bean varieties by smallholder farming households in Rwanda. The improved bean varieties under ...investigation are conventionally-bred, iron biofortified bush and climbing bean varieties, developed for high yield, climate resilience, and increased bioavailable iron content compared to commonly consumed varieties. Seeds of these varieties were delivered to 383,000 farmers across Rwanda by the time we implemented nationally representative survey of bean farmers in 2015 season B. Our findings indicate that growing the seeds of these improved bean varieties, compared to the bean planting materials used by farmers at the time, significantly enhances farmers’ yield and income. The yield increases amount to 153 kg/ha (23%) for growers of improved bush bean seeds and 182 kg/ha (20%) for growers of improved climbing bean seed, while the income increases amounts to $84/ha (27%) for improved bush bean seed growers and $110/ha (23%) for improved iron climbing bean growers, on average. These results bolster public policies and private sector efforts that aim to expand access to improved seeds in Rwanda and other African countries.
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