Production and consumption accounting of CO2 emissions for Xiamen, China

Consumption accounting of urban greenhouse gas emissions is preferable to production accounting, because cities are open systems which depend on the import of large quantities of externally produced goods. In this paper we use environmental input–output analysis to construct CO2 production and consumption accounting inventories for Xiamen, a rapidly developing coastal city in southeast China. We found that, in 2007, total emissions embodied in production were 21.8 Mt CO2, of which 17.1 Mt CO2 were embodied in exports and 4.7 Mt CO2 resulted from local demand on local production. If the large amounts of emissions embodied in the Xiamen reprocessing trade are excluded from the analysis, total imported emissions were 12.2 Mt CO2, consumption emissions were 16.9 Mt CO2, and Xiamen was a net exporter of 4.9 Mt CO2. Although Xiamen's rapid economic growth is dependent on large-scale flows of embodied emissions, most of these emissions are not produced or consumed within the city system. - highlights: • EEBT production and consumption accounting conducted for Xiamen, China. • Imported and exported emissions much larger than direct emissions. • Consumption inventory total extremely sensitive to the accounting method. • Xiamen's higher per capita GDP only partly reflected in higher CO2 consumption