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Carbon inequality is the gap in carbon footprints between the rich and the poor, reflecting an uneven distribution of wealth and mitigation responsibility. Whilst much is known about the level of inequality surrounding responsibility for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, little is known about the evolution in carbon inequality and how the carbon footprints of socio-economic groups have developed over time. Inequality can be reduced either by improving the living standards of the poor or by reducing the overconsumption of the rich, but the choice has very different implications for climate change mitigation. Here, we investigate the carbon footprints of income quintile groups for major 43 economies from 2005 to 2015. We find that most developed economies had declining carbon footprints but expanding carbon inequality, whereas most developing economies had rising footprints but divergent trends in carbon inequality. The top income group in developing economies grew fastest, with its carbon footprint surpassing the top group in developed economies in 2014. Developments are driven by a reduction in GHG intensity in all regions, which is partly offset by income growth in developed countries but more than offset by the rapid growth in selected emerging economies. The top income group in developed economies has achieved the least progress in climate change mitigation, in terms of decline rate, showing resistance of the rich. It shows mitigation efforts could raise carbon inequality. We highlight the necessity of raising the living standard of the poor and consistent mitigation effort is the core of achieving two targets. Rising carbon inequality and its driving factors from 2005 to 2015

The global policy debate on just transitions is concerned with how to achieve a socially just and acceptable transition toward a climate-neutral and climate-resilient global economy. At the core of this debate is the assumption that efforts to combat environmental threats will not succeed unless combined with measures to reduce poverty and inequality. Our research explores the potential of carbon fiscal reforms, combining a carbon tax of levels deemed appropriate to achieve climate targets and the transfer of the revenues raised to vulnerable households. The current energy and cost-of-living crisis shows the importance of protecting the poorest and most vulnerable households from price increases. It also shows the difficulty of achieving short- and long-term policy priorities. Despite the current spikes in energy prices, carbon fiscal reforms can achieve both social and environmental goals through simultaneously decreasing emissions and reducing poverty and inequality. They should act as an effective enabler of just transitions. Carbon fiscal reform can avoid some environmental impacts by incentivising reductions in emissions. Carbon pricing has been increasingly advocated and is now at the centre of policy debates, including the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (COP) and the recent German presidency of the world's leading industrial nations (G7). But carbon fiscal reforms can also be used to raise revenue from carbon pricing instruments to offset the negative effects of higher prices on poorer households as well as further reaching distributional targets and poverty alleviation. Climate targets are negotiated every year, including at COP, hence it is critical to re-evaluate and improve estimates of the distributional impacts of climate policies such as carbon pricing. Public acceptability of climate policies is key to their implementation, but it depends to a large extent on the perceived fairness of such policies. Recycling revenues from carbon taxes directly back to vulnerable households is likely to gain the approval of a large number of people, especially in low-income countries where the high proportion of the population involved in the informal economy means that lowering income tax does not benefit the poorest and most vulnerable sections of society. But the targeting of these direct transfers needs careful consideration. Here, we assess the impact on poverty and inequality of a global carbon tax and national redistribution of revenues to vulnerable households. We look at different options for such redistribution, including a lump sum payment, the use of current social assistance programmes, and an expansion of social assistance following COVID-19. We find that a carbon tax of US$50/tCO2 without revenue redistribution could increase global extreme poverty, but the redistribution of revenue from such a carbon tax could substantially reduce poverty by between 16% and 27% (110 to 190 million people), and reduce inequality (the average Gini coefficient would decline by between 4% and 8%), depending on the scenario. This shows that the way in which revenue from a carbon tax is redistributed greatly affects its impact, underlining the importance of policy design and targeting mechanisms. The recycling of revenues should also take into account the specific political economy of a country and consider international transfers. These findings provide policy makers with a strong basis for informing discussions, starting off with those at COP27, in which ambitious climate targets and just transition should both remain central goals in the context of the ongoing international energy crisis.

Economic globalization and concomitant growth in international trade since the late 1990s have profoundly reorganized global production activities and related CO2 emissions. Here we show trade among developing nations (i.e., South-South trade) has more than doubled between 2004 and 2011, which reflects a new phase of globalization. Some production activities are relocating from China and India to other developing countries, particularly raw materials and intermediate goods production in energy-intensive sectors. In turn, the growth of CO2 emissions embodied in Chinese exports has slowed or reversed, while the emissions embodied in exports from less-developed regions such as Vietnam and Bangladesh have surged. Although China's emissions may be peaking, ever more complex supply chains are distributing energy-intensive industries and their CO2 emissions throughout the global South. This trend may seriously undermine international efforts to reduce global emissions that increasingly rely on rallying voluntary contributions of more, smaller, and less-developed nations.

China has implemented retrofitting measures in coal-fired power plants (CFPPs) to reduce air pollution through small unit shutdown (SUS), the installation of air pollution control devices (APCDs) and power generation efficiency (PGE) improvement. The reductions in highly toxic Hg emissions and their related health impacts by these measures have not been well studied. To refine mitigation options, we evaluated the health benefits of reduced Hg emissions via retrofitting measures during China's 12th Five-Year Plan by combining plant-level Hg emission inventories with the China Hg Risk Source-Tracking Model. We found that the measures reduced Hg emissions by 23.5 tons (approximately 1/5 of that from CFPPs in 2010), preventing 0.0021 points of per-foetus intelligence quotient (IQ) decrements and 114 deaths from fatal heart attacks. These benefits were dominated by CFPP shutdowns and APCD installations. Provincial health benefits were largely attributable to Hg reductions in other regions. We also demonstrated the necessity of considering human health impacts, rather than just Hg emission reductions, in selecting Hg control devices. This study also suggests that Hg control strategies should consider various factors, such as CFPP locations, population densities and trade-offs between reductions of total Hg (THg) and Hg2+.

This study explores the labour impact of four scenarios of electricity generation in Chile, including three coal power phase-down scenarios. These scenarios would result in the creation of between 32 and 40 thousand direct and indirect jobs and between US$1.7 and US$1.8 billion in value added in 2030, compared to present-day situation. Net numbers mask winners and losers. The most significative negative impact we find would be the progressive disappearance of 4 thousand jobs in coal power plants by 2030 or 2050 depending on the scenario. These impacts are not significant when compared to Chile’s labor markets and GDP. Chile’s economy routinely creates more than 40 thousand jobs per trimester, and US$1.7 billion is just 0.8% of GDP, while GDP is expected to grow at least 2.5% per year between today and 2030. At the national level, our results suggest that a careful planning and implementation of coal phase out could be able to mitigate its negative impacts, given that they will be small relative to the size of Chile’s economy. In practice, whether the jobs created nationally match the skills available in the geographical location of current coal power plants is likely to play a key role. This study does not investigate this issue, but a separate technical note studies affected communities with more details and provides lessons learned from historic management of the labor impacts of policy reforms.

Carbon taxes are advocated as efficient fiscal and environmental policies, but they have proven difficult to implement. One reason is that carbon taxes can aggravate poverty by increasing prices of basic goods and services such as food, heating, and commuting. Meanwhile, cash transfer programs have been established as some of the most efficient poverty-reducing policies used in developing countries. Here, we quantify how governments can mitigate negative social consequences of carbon taxes by expanding the beneficiary base or the amounts disbursed with existing cash transfer programs. We focus on Latin America and the Caribbean, a region that has pioneered cash transfer programs, which aspires to contribute to climate mitigation, and faces inequality. We find that 30% of carbon revenues could suffice to compensate poor and vulnerable households on average, leaving 70% to fund other political priorities. We also quantify tradeoffs for governments choosing who and how much to compensate.

Carbon taxes are advocated as efficient fiscal and environmental policies, but they have proven difficult to implement. One reason is that carbon taxes can aggravate poverty by increasing prices of basic goods and services such as food, heating, and commuting. Meanwhile, cash transfer programs have been established as some of the most efficient poverty-reducing policies used in developing countries. Here, we quantify how governments can mitigate negative social consequences of carbon taxes by expanding the beneficiary base or the amounts disbursed with existing cash transfer programs. We focus on Latin America and the Caribbean, a region that has pioneered cash transfer programs, which aspires to contribute to climate mitigation, and faces inequality. We find that 30% of carbon revenues could suffice to compensate poor and vulnerable households on average, leaving 70% to fund other political priorities. We also quantify tradeoffs for governments choosing who and how much to compensate.

Energy subsidies have been criticized due to their economic inefficiency and promotion of wasteful usage of energy and associated carbon emissions. Conversely, environmental taxes are advocated as efficient policy instruments. Nonetheless, removing subsidies and taxing energy can be politically challenging because vulnerable households rely on low energy prices. This study analyzes the impact of energy price increases on different income quintiles groups in eleven Latin American and Caribbean countries using an energy-extended input-output approach. Our results show that higher-income groups benefit more from low energy prices than low-income groups when tracing both the direct and indirect (supply chain) effects of energy price variations. Energy subsidies are a very expensive option to transfer income to poor households. Across the countries considered, using energy subsidies it would cost about $12 to transfer $1 of income to households in the poorest quintile. Recycling a small fraction of fiscal revenues from energy subsidy removal or energy taxation could be sufficient to compensate vulnerable households from the effects of price hikes. Our findings suggest that cash transfers to poor households and targeted subsidies for public transportation or food are the most effective measures to compensate households for welfare loss.

Energy subsidies have been criticized due to their economic inefficiency and promotion of wasteful usage of energy and associated carbon emissions. Conversely, environmental taxes are advocated as efficient policy instruments. Nonetheless, removing subsidies and taxing energy can be politically challenging because vulnerable households rely on low energy prices. This study analyzes the impact of energy price increases on different income quintiles groups in eleven Latin American and Caribbean countries using an energy-extended input-output approach. Our results show that higher-income groups benefit more from low energy prices than low-income groups when tracing both the direct and indirect (supply chain) effects of energy price variations. Energy subsidies are a very expensive option to transfer income to poor households. Across the countries considered, using energy subsidies it would cost about $12 to transfer $1 of income to households in the poorest quintile. Recycling a small fraction of fiscal revenues from energy subsidy removal or energy taxation could be sufficient to compensate vulnerable households from the effects of price hikes. Our findings suggest that cash transfers to poor households and targeted subsidies for public transportation or food are the most effective measures to compensate households for welfare loss.

Chinese economy has been recovering slowly from the global financial crisis, but it cannot achieve the same rapid development of the pre-recession period. Instead, the country has entered a new phase of economic development – a "new normal". We use a structural decomposition analysis (SDA) and environmental input-output analysis (IOA) to estimate the determinants of China's carbon emission changes during 2005-2012. China's imports are linked to a global multi-regional input-output (MRIO) model based on the Global Trade and Analysis Project (GTAP) database to calculate the embodied CO2 emissions in imports. We find that the global financial crisis has affected the drivers of China's carbon emissions growth. From 2007 to 2010, the CO2 emissions induced by China's exports dropped, whereas emissions induced by capital formation grew rapidly. In the "new normal", the strongest factors that offset CO2 emissions have shifted from efficiency gains to structural upgrading. Efficiency was the strongest factor offsetting China's CO2 emissions before 2010 but drove a 1.4% increase in emissions in the period 2010-2012. By contrast, production structure and consumption patterns caused a 2.6% and 1.3% decrease, respectively, in China's carbon emissions from 2010 to 2012. In addition, China tends to shift gradually from an investment to a consumption-driven economy. The proportion of CO2 emissions induced by consumption had a declining trend before 2010 but grew from 28.6% to 29.1% during 2010-2012.

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.

Economic globalisation refers to flows of trade and capital among and between countries. A critical view on economic globalisation is that the historical forces influencing how and when a given country becomes integrated into global trade (and the world economy as a whole) condition the potential paths of development open to that country (e.g., Ref. [1]). Here, trade and other relations between countries act as structural mechanisms enabling wealthier, more core countries to maintain favourable terms of trade, which, in turn, negatively impact less developed, more peripheral ones in a variety of ways [2, 3].

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 multi-region 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 socio-economic and technological scenarios. Our result shows 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 a third of cropland associated with household consumption (34 Mha) will be “outsourced” to foreign countries, such as Argentina, Brazil, United States and Thailand, for the consumption of cereal grains, soybeans and paddy rice. China also consumes 2.4 Mha 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.

Our recent study in this journal quantified the drivers of US CO2 emissions between 1997 and 2013, with particular focus on the decline in emissions after 2007. Based on our findings, we argued that economic recession was more important than substitution of natural gas for coal in the power sector. In their comment, Kotchen and Mansur reevaluate and reinterpret our results to\ud challenge this conclusion. Because their calculations, using two alternative methods, are consistent with our findings, here we respond to their alternative interpretation.

Using an augmented Chinese input–output table in which information about firm ownership and type of traded goods are explicitly reported, we show that ignoring firm heterogeneity causes embodied CO2 emissions in Chinese exports to be overestimated by 20% at the national level, with huge differences at the sector level, for 2007. This is because different types of firm that are allocated to the same sector of the conventional Chinese input–output table vary greatly in terms of market share, production technology and carbon intensity. This overestimation of export-related carbon emissions would be even higher if it were not for the fact that 80% of CO2 emissions embodied in exports of foreign-owned firms are, in fact, emitted by Chinese-owned firms upstream of the supply chain. The main reason is that the largest CO2 emitter, the electricity sector located upstream in Chinese domestic supply chains, is strongly dominated by Chinese-owned firms with very high carbon intensity.

A growing body of literature discusses the CO2 emissions of cities. Still, little is known about emission patterns across density gradients from remote rural places to highly urbanized areas, the drivers behind those emission patterns and the global emissions triggered by consumption in human settlements—referred to here as the carbon footprint. In this letter we use a hybrid method for estimating the carbon footprints of cities and other human settlements in the UK explicitly linking global supply chains to local consumption activities and associated lifestyles. This analysis comprises all areas in the UK, whether rural or urban. We compare our consumption-based results with extended territorial CO2 emission estimates and analyse the driving forces that determine the carbon footprint of human settlements in the UK. Our results show that 90% of the human settlements in the UK are net importers of CO2 emissions. Consumption-based CO2 emissions are much more homogeneous than extended territorial emissions. Both the highest and lowest carbon footprints can be found in urban areas, but the carbon footprint is consistently higher relative to extended territorial CO2 emissions in urban as opposed to rural settlement types. The impact of high or low density living remains limited; instead, carbon footprints can be comparatively high or low across density gradients depending on the location-specific socio-demographic, infrastructural and geographic characteristics of the area under consideration. We show that the carbon footprint of cities and other human settlements in the UK is mainly determined by socio-economic rather than geographic and infrastructural drivers at the spatial aggregation of our analysis. It increases with growing income, education and car ownership as well as decreasing household size. Income is not more important than most other socio-economic determinants of the carbon footprint. Possibly, the relationship between lifestyles and infrastructure only impacts carbon footprints significantly at higher spatial granularity.

In this study, we apply the inter-regional input–output model to explain the relationship between China’s inter-regional spillover of CO2 emissions and domestic supply chains for 2002 and 2007. Based on this model, we propose alternative indicators such as the trade in CO2 emissions, CO2 emissions in trade, regional trade balances, and comparative advantage of CO2 emissions. The empirical results not only reveal the nature and significance of inter-regional environmental spillover within China’s domestic regions but also demonstrate how CO2 emissions are created and distributed across regions via domestic production networks. The main finding shows that a region’s CO2 emissions depend on not only its intra-regional production technique, energy use efficiency but also its position and participation degree in domestic and global supply chains.

In this study, we apply the inter-regional input–output model to explain the relationship between China’s inter-regional spillover of CO2 emissions and domestic supply chains for 2002 and 2007. Based on this model, we propose alternative indicators such as the trade in CO2 emissions, CO2 emissions in trade, regional trade balances, and comparative advantage of CO2 emissions. The empirical results not only reveal the nature and significance of inter-regional environmental spillover within China’s domestic regions but also demonstrate how CO2 emissions are created and distributed across regions via domestic production networks. The main finding shows that a region’s CO2 emissions depend on not only its intra-regional production technique, energy use efficiency but also its position and participation degree in domestic and global supply chains.

Funding for Open Access provided by the UMD Libraries' Open Access Publishing Fund., The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change aims to keep warming below 2 °C while recognizing developing countries’ right to eradicate extreme poverty. Poverty eradication is also the first of the Sustainable Development Goals. This paper investigates potential consequences for climate targets of achieving poverty eradication. We find that eradicating extreme poverty, i.e., moving people to an income above $1.9 purchasing power parity (PPP) a day, does not jeopardize the climate target even in the absence of climate policies and with current technologies. On the other hand, bringing everybody to a still modest expenditure level of at least $2.97 PPP would have long-term consequences on achieving emission targets. Compared to the reference mitigation pathway, eradicating extreme poverty increases the effort by 2.8% whereas bringing everybody to at least $2.97 PPP would increase the required mitigation rate by 27%. Given that the top 10% global income earners are responsible for 36% of the current carbon footprint of households; the discourse should address income distribution and the carbon intensity of lifestyles.