China’s impacts on global sustainability

Global warming requires a global solution, and controlling emissions of greenhouse gases in developing countries is essential. Producers must use natural resources as intermediate inputs. If such inputs are domestic, the environmental load of the production occurs domestically. Under the influence of globalization, however, producers now routinely import intermediate inputs and produce goods in multiple countries. In such cases, production in one country induces production elsewhere, and the environmental loads occurring in such countries are related. This behavior generates the phenomena of embodied environmental loads (EEL) and brings international trade to the fore of global environmental concerns.

This study estimated embodied CO₂ emissions using the World International Input-Output Table of WIOD and investigated structural changes in world CO₂ emissions between 1995 and 2009. CO₂ emissions in Japan, the EU, and the USA fell slightly, but they increased in emerging industrialized economies, including China. Post-Kyoto cooperation among developing economies is indispensable for reducing global CO₂ emissions, but results show that industrialized countries subrogated their CO₂ emissions (or energy consumption) to developing economies such as China. Industrialized economies blame emerging economies for pollution, yet trade shifted the burden of pollution onto those economies.