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Understanding carbon emissions embodied in trade is an important prerequisite for the effective formulation of climate mitigation policies. Based on input–output analysis and panel regression models, this study proposes a multi-step forecasting procedure to simulate carbon emissions embodied in bilateral trade. We calculate carbon emissions embodied in the trade between China and Australia during 2000–2014 and forecast the same for the period 2015–2022 under four different development scenarios. The results show that, during 2000–2014, net carbon outflow from China to Australia increased from 2.2 to 15.5 Mt CO2, concentrated in textile and heavy manufacturing sectors. The simulation results show that, the forecasts of “R&D focus” and “GDP focus” scenarios constitute the lower and upper bounds of embodied emissions, and the latter is more than two times of the former in 2022 both for embodied emissions in Australia's exports and China's exports. Finally, conclusions are drawn and policy implications are discussed.

Growing international trade is likely to become a major obstacle in reducing carbon emissions. Research that estimates trade-related emissions and analyzes the sources will be important to overcoming this obstacle. With this in mind, the current paper investigates carbon emissions embodied in South Korea's trade during 2000–2014. Using multi-regional input-output analysis, we find large increases in emissions embodied in exports (production-based emissions) and imports (consumption-based emissions) which drove increases in Korean emissions. Over time, Korea's net carbon exports grew alongside its net value-added exports, implying a greater trade-off between the environmental costs and economic benefits of trade. However, emission intensities of exports and imports both fell which suggests improvements in emission efficiencies at home and abroad. Analysis of bilateral trade shows that growth in trade with China accounted for the largest share of increases in Korea's embodied emissions. Analysis at the sectoral level shows high levels of emissions relative to value added in basic materials and transportation services but low levels of emissions relative to value added in electronic and mechanical equipment and transportation equipment. Lastly, structural decomposition analysis indicates that improvements in emission intensities limited growth in emissions, while rising levels of final demand expanded growth in emissions. As the first extensive study to analyze the drivers of changes in Korea's carbon emissions embodied in multilateral exports and imports, this paper recommends various abatement policies to effectively reduce emissions.

CO2 emissions embodied in international trade are critical to the national carbon mitigation strategy. Studies estimating embodied CO2 emissions in China often overestimate actual values. This work calculates China's CO2 emissions embodied in bilateral trade with the USA, European Union, Japan and other countries using a modified, non-competitive import input–output method and latest data. The results show that net CO2 emissions embodied in China's trade in 2007 were only 400 million tons, much lower than previous estimations. Accordingly, China's CO2 emission on the consumption side in 2007 dropped to 5.628 billion tons, with the transfer part accounting for 6.6% of total CO2 emissions calculated for the production side. It is concluded that because CO2 emissions embodied in trade are not as great as previously estimated, China should place more emphases on energy saving and emission reduction on its own side instead of emission transfer to substantially mitigate CO2 emissions.

China faces immense difficulties caused by its domestic regional air pollution caused by atmospheric diffusion of pollutants across administrative boundaries. Because of the closer interregional economic connections that have formed, in this study we focus on the virtual flows of pollutants embodied in interprovincial trade. We compared two methods, embodied emissions in bilateral trade (EEBT) and the multiregional input–output (MRIO) model, to determine emission flows for 2002 and 2007 and found that the results between these two approaches differed significantly, particularly for the year 2007. This indicates that the choice of the accounting method has obvious impacts on subsequent decisions. Further analysis based on the MRIO method, which captures the complete interregional supply chains and is more applicable to consumption-based studies, showed that the embodied SO 2 emissions in interprovincial trade accounted for 27.58% of the total SO 2 emissions in China in 2002 and 35.25% in 2007. Inner Mongolia, Shanxi, and Guizhou were the major embodied emission-exporting regions, with sources mainly from the electricity, nonmetal mineral production, chemicals, and metal smelting sectors. The exported emissions mainly ended up in rich provinces, including Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Guangdong, due to those provinces' final demands for products of the construction, food production, and transport equipment manufacturing sectors. Furthermore, rich provinces were net importers in interprovincial trade, with a pollution terms of trade value less than one. The results yield important implications for China's air pollution controls: emission reduction tasks should be reasonably distributed among provinces to prevent developed provinces from outsourcing more pollution emissions to less developed provinces through interprovincial trade; regulation of consumption in developed provinces would help to control national pollution; financial and technical support for pollution control should favor the less developed regions.

Greenhouse gas emissions embodied in international trade have grown rapidly as globalization has progressed and potentially threaten the efficacy of unilateral climate treaties such as the Kyoto Protocol. Consumption-based methods have been put forward as a way of overcoming this issue and help design future climate policies. We improve the Long-term Consumption-based Accounting (LCBA) model, with transfer carbon data from 1948 to 2012 by introducing country-specific import intensities and detailed bilateral trade data from UNcomtrade. Comparisons of our new “LCBA2″ model with existing 4 studies show similar consumption based emission patterns both in trend and magnitude, and significant emission changes in many European countries. The results independently confirm previous findings on the efficacy of the Kyoto Protocol. The results indicate transferred emissions have contributed an historic 36 Gt CO 2 of cumulative emissions, have grown rapidly during the past 30 years (up to 8% of total emissions) and are likely to become increasingly influential in the near future as the global economy recovers. We also use the improved model to study other gases (CH 4 , N 2 O and SO 2 ) embodied in trade, and results indicate similar transfer patterns as CO 2 with comparable or even moderately larger magnitudes. Across-method result differences between LCBA2 with 3 other models are analyzed based on using common input datasets. Large emitters show moderate biases (within 10%) and about 75% of countries have differences within 25%, independent of input dataset. The LCBA2 model provides useful estimates of transferred emissions in both across-country and long-term historical contexts.

Based on a measurement model for carbon transfers in bilateral trade between regions and an improved log-mean Divisia index decomposition method, this study estimates carbon transfers caused by inter-provincial demand and inter-provincial exports for 2007, 2010, and 2012 and investigates the main factors that affect net carbon transfers between provinces. The results show the following. First, in 2007–2012, the average carbon emissions caused by inter-provincial demand and inter-provincial exports account for about 35.4% and 8% of total production-based carbon emissions, respectively, which indicates that carbon transfers between provinces are widespread. Second, total carbon transfers caused by inter-provincial demand keep increasing, and in 2012, 19 provinces show net carbon outflows, and provinces located in the northern and central regions receive most net carbon inflows. By contrast, net carbon outflows induced by inter-provincial export keep decreasing and are concentrated in eight provinces in the Beijing–Tianjin, eastern, and southern coastal areas. Third, the scale and structural effects increase net carbon transfers between provinces in 2007–2010 and 2010–2012, respectively, whereas the technological effect reduces net carbon transfers between provinces in 2007–2012. Our empirical results suggest that carbon emissions and inter-provincial carbon transfers can be reduced effectively through inter-provincial cooperation and narrowing provincial differences in emissions reduction technology.

CO2 emission embodied in trade is an important aspect to respond international carbon mitigation. Half of China's emission increase was due to production of exports. In order to analyze the reason of such a rapid emission increase, embodied CO2 emission flows between China and Japan for the period of 2000–2009 were estimated in this study by using emission embodied in bilateral trade (EEBT) approach in order to raise policy implications for both countries from trade perspective. Decomposition analysis was further conducted in order to identify driving forces underlying changes during the study period. Moreover, the concept of dependence on traded CO2 was proposed for analyzing mutual dependence of China and Japan's carbon emission and economy. The results show that China was a net exporter of embodied CO2 emissions between China and Japan trade, but both China's exported emissions and net emission transfer to Japan began to decrease after 2007. More emissions were embodied in more advanced and less carbon intensive products, especially for China's exports. Driving force analysis shows that trade volume was the main driver for the increase of embodied emissions and technology effect contributed mainly to the decrease. The absolute value of technology effect was even larger than activity effect in some years. This study also reveals that Japan was relatively more dependent on China's CO2 emissions and showed an increasing trend over the last decade, while China's economic development was more dependent on imports from Japan and such a situation reversed after 2006. This study suggests that China should further reduce its emission intensity for narrowing the gap of embodied emissions between the bilateral trade flows and Japanese energy-saving technologies should be transferred to China.

Cities play an important role in carbon emissions reduction and climate change mitigation. In this study, we examine the CO2 emissions embodied in the imports and exports of the Hong Kong special administrative region (SAR) from 1990 to 2015 using the emissions embodied in bilateral trade (EEBT) method. The results show that Hong Kong SAR has been a net CO2 importer and Mainland China plays a dominating role in the embodied CO2 emissions of Hong Kong SAR. The sectors with high imported CO2 emissions are mainly the energy sectors, such as electricity, heat, gas and water production and supply. Population density, GDP per capita, and trade openness have significantly positive effects on net CO2 emissions increases in Hong Kong SAR, with population density taking the leading role. Population density increases by 1%, total net CO2 emissions increase by 4%. Population slowdown scenario simulation results show that net CO2 emissions of Hong Kong SAR could be reduced by 5.5%. Whereas, net CO2 emissions of Hong Kong SAR could increase by 8.7% in the accelerated economic development scenario. Therefore, to reduce CO2 emissions, Hong Kong SAR need control its population, develop the circular economy, and promote green lifestyle and consumption patterns.

Aimed at enhancing economic prosperity through unimpeded trade, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is controversial as large-scale infrastructure construction may accelerate energy consumption and deteriorate environment of BRI countries. Against this background, from the perspective of energy intensity gap evolution of BRI countries, this paper combines the panel smooth transition model with β -convergence model to investigate the role of China-BRI trade in energy intensity convergence of 59 BRI countries during 1996–2015, including the trade scale effect, technology effect and composite effect, as well as the tempo-spatial differences of energy intensity convergence rates. The empirical results show that, first, in the premise of reducing energy intensity, the scale of China-BRI trade facilitates energy intensity convergence rate by about 13% of BRI countries when exceeding the trade threshold value. Second, the technology effect accelerates the energy intensity convergence rate in the context of reducing energy intensity; in particular, the high-skill and low-medium skill technology spillover effect increase the energy intensity convergence rate by 12% and 15%, respectively. Third, the composite effect appears insignificant on the energy intensity convergence of BRI countries. Finally, BRI countries with larger bilateral trade scale or more shares of technology-intensive imports with China tend to have greater energy intensity convergence rates than other counterparts.