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Abstract Achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires an overall and well-balanced achievement of all SDGs rather than cherry-picking a few. While it is vital to assess the evenness of SDGs achievement, such analysis, particularly on a global scale, is still evidently absent from the existing literature. To remedy such a scholarly gap, this paper measures the evenness of SDGs achievement for 193 countries from 2010 to 2019 by adapting the evenness assessment method originating from ecology and biodiversity literature. Our analyses regarding the country-level SDG evenness index scores (EIS) indicate a significant heterogeneity across countries. Global South countries usually underperform in the evenness of 17 goals, while a significant portion of Global North countries also suffer from the unbalanced developments in SDGs. By integrating the evenness measures into the conventional global SDG monitoring framework, this study identifies six development paths in pursuing the SDGs and shows that maintaining the overall SDGs improvements while balancing the development of each goal is practical but has not taken place in at least 35% of countries. We estimate that the SDG evenness and average performance could further increase by 3.5 p.p. and 2.1 p.p., or 74 percent and 50 percent of the growth in the baseline continue past paths scenario, respectively, if each country could follow the effective development path of frontier counterparts with similar income levels. Our SDG evenness measures, complemented by inter-temporal cross-country analyses, could inform policies and cooperation strategies to identify the weaknesses in sustainable development, boost effective growth, and protect unevenly developed countries. Future research could further develop these measures to provide deeper insights into achieving rapid and well-balanced development of SDGs at various levels.

Determining transportation routes is of great importance for advancing China-Russian gas cooperation, which has been hanging in the balance. This paper employs a general equilibrium model to assess the congestion cost of diversified gas transmission schemes between China and Russia on domestic long-distance pipelines, which addresses the inherent limitations of exclusively considering transport impacts in the decision-making process. Findings reveal a notable decrease in pipeline congestion incidents for the route integrated with the Shaan-Jing system, thus lending empirical credence to the feasibility of the proposed scenario involving Mongolia. In addition, key routes are defined in this paper based on congestion costs, which emphasize the challenges posed by bilateral gas cooperation to China's long-distance natural gas pipeline network, necessitating a strategic focus on critical pipelines as the top priority of pipeline optimization efforts in the future. This paper provides valuable insights into planning the second China-Russia gas pipeline and the decision-making process for the future development of long-distance pipeline infrastructure.

Abstract Cities are at the heart of climate change mitigation as they account for over 70% of global carbon emissions. However, cities vary in their energy systems and socioeconomic capacities to transition to renewable energy. To address this heterogeneity, this study proposes an Energy Transition Index (ETI) specifically designed for cities, and applies it to track the progress of energy transition in Chinese cities. The city-level ETI framework is based on the national ETI developed by the World Economic Forum (WEF) and comprises two sub-indexes: the Energy System Performance sub-index, which evaluates the current status of cities’ energy systems in terms of energy transition, and the Transition Readiness sub-index, which assesses their socioeconomic capacity for future energy transition. The initial version of the dataset includes ETI and its sub-indexes for 282 Chinese cities from 2003 to 2019, with annual updates planned. The spatiotemporal data provided by the dataset facilitates research into the energy transition roadmap for different cities, which can help China achieve its energy transition goals.

Summary: Food plays a vital role in human sustenance and well-being, and the fluctuations in its price exert a significant impact on the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) from social, economic, and environmental perspectives. This paper conducts an analysis utilizing data from 163 countries, revealing that an upsurge in global food commodity prices entails trade-offs with 13 SDGs, while exhibiting synergies with a few others. By considering specific food products, various types of countries, and the supply and demand shocks, further analysis confirms predominantly negative associations between spikes in food prices and the SDGs. Our findings highlight the urgent imperative to mitigate abrupt increases in food prices, such as those witnessed during the 2022 food crisis, to ensure the comprehensive fulfillment of the 2030 agenda for SDGs.

In order to achieve carbon neutrality in a few decades, the clean energy proportion in power mix of China will significantly rise to over 90%. A consensus has been reached recently that it will be of great significance to promote hydrogen energy, that is produced by variable renewable energy power generation, as a mainstay energy form in view of its potential value on achieving carbon neutrality. This is because hydrogen energy is capable of complementing the power system and realizing further electrification, especially in the section that cannot be easily replaced by electric energy. Power system related planning model is commonly used for mid-term and long-term planning implemented through power installation and interconnection capacity expansion optimization. In consideration of the high importance of hydrogen and its close relationship with electricity, an inclusive perspective which contains both kinds of the foresaid energy is required to deal with planning problems. In this study, a joint model is established by coupling hydrogen energy model in the chronological operation power planning model to realize coordinated optimization on energy production, transportation and storage. By taking the carbon neutrality scenario of China as an example, the author applies this joint model to deploy a scheme research on power generation and hydrogen production, inter-regional energy transportation capacity, and hydrogen storage among various regions. Next, by taking the technology progress and cost decrease prediction uncertainty into account, the main technical–economic parameters are employed as variables to carry out sensitivity analysis research, with a hope that the quantitative calculation and results discussion could provide suggestion and reference to energy-related companies, policy-makers and institute researchers in formulating strategies on related energy development.

This paper addresses the issues regarding the economics of clean energy transmission channels in Southeast Asia. The research developed an improved comprehensive model for the generation and transmission planning considering variable renewable energy characteristics, and it simulated the hourly resolution operation condition of a cross-regional interconnection grid of Southeast Asia, China, and South Asia. Additionally, we conducted a sensitivity analysis, and the assessment of the channels’ economics covered a variety of factors such as clean energy penetration, CO2, and pollutant reduction. Conclusions are drawn regarding the influence of different parameters and conditions on the economics of the transmission channel. Subsequently, several recommendations were proposed based on these analyses, which could support the development of the scheme of Southeast Asia power grid and the interconnection of the Belt and Road initiative.

Summary: Although China has developed the world’s largest carbon emissions trading scheme (ETS), there is no official documentation explaining how the current sectoral coverage plan was determined and what sectoral rollout plan is preferred. Here, we contribute to the policy development of the world’s largest carbon market by suggesting a priority list of industries be covered in the ETS. We estimated marginal abatement cost curves using a database of more than two million firms covering over 500 four-digit industries that account for more than 97% of total industrial emissions, and simulating various carbon market scenarios including thermal power, 13 designated, and an additional 50 industries that have high emissions or are covered in other ETSs. Our analysis suggests that the cement industry should be the next sector to be included in China’s ETS. In our revised list, the average abatement cost can be reduced by 39.5–78.3% compared with the business-as-usual scenario.

Summary: Cities’ transition from fossil-based systems of energy production and consumption to renewable energy sources—the energy transition—is critical to mitigating climate change impact as cities’ energy consumption and CO2 emissions account for two-thirds and over 70% of the world’s total, respectively. Given cities’ heterogeneity, they need specific low-carbon roadmaps instead of one-size-fits-all approaches. Here, we used an Energy Transition Index (ETI) to characterize the city-level energy transitions from energy system performance and transition readiness dimensions. The ETI scores for 282 cities in China revealed a significant heterogeneity across cities and over time, and the gap between the cities in the top and bottom quartiles was persistent. We estimated that China’s energy and carbon intensity could decrease by 34% and 32%, respectively, and that carbon per capita could fall by 17% if each city modestly follows the sustainable development path forged by the best performing cities with similar economic structures.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic has triggered adiscussion of the relationship between urbanization and the spread of infectious diseases. Namely, whether urbanization will exacerbate the spread of infectious diseases. Based on 31 provincial data from 2002 to 2018 in China, the impact of urbanization on the spread of infectious diseases from the dimensions of “population” and “land” is analyzed in this paper by using the GMM (generalized method of moments) model. The empirical study shows that the population increase brought by urbanization does not aggravate the spread of infectious diseases. On the contrary, urban education, employment and entrepreneurship, housing, medical and health care, and other basic public services brought by population urbanization can help reduce the risk of the spread of infectious diseases. The increasing density of buildings caused by land urbanization increases the risk of the spread of infectious diseases. Moreover, the impact of urbanization on the spread of infectious diseases has regional heterogeneity. Therefore, the prevention and control of disease play a crucial role.

The impact of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) on the environment is an important but controversial topic. But assessing it faces a significant challenge for separating its policy impact from the overall effect of economic development that will also have environmental impacts. This paper attempts to provide an evolutionary and counterfactual baseline to evaluate the environmental impact of BRI, based on the distribution dynamics approach and the mobility probability plots (MPPs). Our estimation results suggest that while the majority of BRI economies will lower their emission levels compared with the world average, there are significant differences between BRI and non-BRI countrie’s emission patterns and dynamics. The majority of non-BRI economies will have lower emission levels than their BRI counterparts in the absence of BRI policy, indicating that the difference in future emissions between BRI and non-BRI countries should not be completely attributed to the environmental impact of BRI. Instead, BRI should take measures to prevent certain countries from moving upwards energy intensity paths through policy intervention, international cooperation, and an inclusive project assessment process.

China is the largest producer of carbon in the world. China’s construction industry has received widespread attention in recent years due to its environmental issues. However, little research has been conducted to investigate the environmental efficiency of the domestic part of this industry. As the foreign contribution is beyond China’s control, identification of domestic carbon emissions is necessary to formulate effective policy interventions. Based on a multi-regional input‐output model, this study attempts to reduce the statistical bias associated with international trade, thereby obtaining a more accurate indicator of domestic carbon emission intensity. This study aims to reveal the change in the domestic carbon emission intensity of China’s construction industry during 2000–2014 and analyze the reason behind it. The results show that, first, both the constructed intensity indicator and commonly used measures of carbon emission intensity have exhibited a decreasing trend over the study period. However, the former has been consistently larger than the latter. Moreover, this difference first increased and then suddenly decreased after a particular year. Second, although the domestic carbon emission intensity shows a gradually declining trend, it has moved from second to first in global rankings, implying that China’s domestic construction industry’s carbon emission efficiency, while falling, lags behind other major economies. Third, the structural decomposition results reveal that changes in direct production emission intensity are the leading causes of the decline in domestic carbon emission intensity. In contrast, a change in the intermediate input structure led to an increase in the emission intensity in China’s construction industry. In addition, the enormous gaps of domestic carbon emission intensity in the construction industry between China and the selected countries are mainly attributable to the difference in the intermediate input structure. The study suggests that China’s construction industry needs to promote high value-added output, optimize intermediate input structure, and improve energy and emission efficiency.

Economic shocks from COVID-19, coupled with ongoing US-China tensions, have raised debates around supply chain (or global value chain) organisation, with China at the centre of the storm. However, quantitative studies that consider the global and economy-wide impacts of rerouting supply chains are limited. This study examines the economic and emissions impacts of reorganising supply chains, using Australia-China trade as an example. It augments the Hypothetical Extraction Method by replacing traditional Input-Output analysis with a Computable General Equilibrium analysis. The estimation results demonstrate that in both exports and imports, a trade embargo between Australia and China – despite being compensated for by alternative supply chains—will cause gross domestic production losses and emissions increases for both countries and the world overall. Moreover, even though all other economies gain from the markets left by China, many of them incur overall gross domestic production losses and emission increases. The finding that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and India may also suffer from an Australia-China trade embargo, despite a gain in trade volume, suggests that no country should add fuel to the fire. The results suggest that countries need to defend a rules-based trading regime and jointly address supply chain challenges.

ASEAN is an interesting case study of regional power connectivity in Asia and the Pacific due to its geographic location and ongoing power connectivity within and beyond ASEAN. This paper reviews ASEAN’s power connectivity within ASEAN and between ASEAN and its neighbours (hereafter ASEAN connectivity). Through literature survey, it identifies challenges to the ASEAN connectivity from political, legal, economic and technical perspectives. Based on these analyses, it then explores what, how and when regional cooperation may be able to facilitate ASEAN power connectivity. Keywords: Power connectivity, ASEAN, China, ASEAN Power Grid, GMS

China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has attracted the world's attention since it was proposed. This study focuses on the BRI in the energy sector in ASEAN. It examines the current status of China's investment into ASEAN's energy sector. It then discusses the problems of China's investment into the ASEAN energy sector with two cases in Myanmar. In addressing the problems and challenges, the study adopts a ‘sense of ownership’ framework to analyze how to improve the acceptability of the Chinese investment. It argues that the BRI priorities, including ‘people-to-people bond’, provide an opportunity to bring a sense of ownership to the community networking that is to be built as a key part of BRI and more profoundly, an opportunity to establish a good image and to make investment projects successful. Keywords: Belt and Road Initiative, ASEAN, Energy investment, Sense of ownership

This paper clarifies various concepts relevant to gas trading hubs and presents an innovative framework with key elements to create gas hubs. The nine key elements in the framework are further divided into basic elements for balancing hubs and advanced elements for benchmark hubs. The framework is applied to three East Asian case studies. The East Asian comparative case study shows that while Singapore is leading the way in establishing an LNG hub in Asia, the LNG hub concept is yet to be tested. Meanwhile, although China has the potential to host a gas hub, its current level of hub development is low. The paper suggests that these countries can advance their hub initiatives by strengthening the key elements as detailed in the proposed framework and create a more conducive environment through efforts such as market liberalization. Keywords: Gas hub, LNG hub, Elements, China, Japan, Singapore

The Belt and Road investment involves a large number of renewable energy projects, but whether the energy efficiency is linked to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) cooperation has yet to be established in the literature. This research attempts to close this gap by looking at how the BRI affects the energy efficiency of participating nations after the fact through a counterfactual analysis. Based on the Difference-in-Difference-in-Difference (DDD) and quantile DID methods for the panel dataset covering 178 nations and areas for the period of 2002 to 2018, we explored the impacts of BRI on energy efficiency vary by different energy efficiency quantiles, resource endowments, and income levels. First, the positive effects of BRI are significant in medium-and high-energy efficiency quantiles but are not significant in low-energy efficiency quantiles for up to 30%. Second, the BRI tends to increase more energy efficiencies in resource-rich BRI countries than those in resource-poor BRI countries. Third, the BRI tends to increase more energy efficiencies in low-income BRI countries than those in high-income BRI countries. The findings can assist BRI countries in improving energy efficiency and sustainable development capacity under the initiative, thus resolving the increasing anxieties in climate change and environmental pollution in this area.

The natural gas market in East Asia remains fragmented without a functioning benchmark price to duly reflect the dynamics of demand and supply forces in the region. A functional regional gas futures market, which is highly dependent on the presence of well-developed physical spot trading, is yet to be established. Since the intra-regional pipeline connection is largely non-existent in East Asia, it is the LNG spot cargo trading that is likely to become the basis for the regional gas futures market. This paper offers a novel approach to understanding the development of such a market by analyzing the experience of a different commodity market – the Dojima Rice Exchange (DRE) – and identifying potentially transferrable lessons in the market design and the role of government regulations. Based on the case study analysis, implications for the development of natural gas trading hubs in East Asia are offered and an LNG futures exchange design is put forward.

Gas trading hubs have been initially developed in the US in 1980s, UK in 1990s, more recently in European in the 2000s and mulled in East Asia now. Due to its freshness and diversification in nationality, governance and culture, the European hub experience can offer valuable lessons for East Asia. This paper seeks to advance understanding of gas hub development in Europe and provide lessons for East Asia. The European experience highlights that market liberalization and transition of gas pricing mechanism are necessary in creating the competitive markets that are needed for functional gas hubs. Political will and regulations further safeguard the competition environment needed for hub development. Natural factors, such as significant domestic production and culture could have a significant impact on the hub development and transition of pricing mechanism. In East Asia, the path to gas trading hubs might be more difficult than in Europe but a growing market creates an opportunity to start new terms with new contracts. Nevertheless, East Asian needs to work hard to development its indigenous gas or LNG trading hubs.

This paper summarizes the four papers in the special issues on ‘Gas and LNG pricing and trading hub in East Asia’. The papers examine lessons and experience from European hub development, other commodity, the Japanese history on developing of futures markets and inter-fuel substitution in East Asia. The papers finds that liquid futures market is the key to formulate benchmark prices while a well-developed spot market is the foundation; political will and strong leadership are required to overcome the power of incumbents and to restructure the gas market that impede the the development of competitive markets; and East Asia needs to develop its indigenous gas or LNG trading hubs even in low oil prices period and its developing market allows easier changes in new contracts than in existing ones. This hub development requires governments to go through tough domestic market reforms, including liberalization and cooperation with each other and with gas exporters.

Prompted by rising concern about weak consumer switching and the practice of price discrimination, over the period of 2016–2019, the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (Ofgem) undertook a series of trials on communication-based interventions to encourage consumer switching in the United Kingdom. The main purpose of this paper is to assess the experience of these Ofgem trials with a view to draw some lessons for policy makers. The analytical framework adopted for this purpose is informed by existing literature on the barriers for consumer switching. The results of the analysis suggest that while the Ofgem trials have made positive impacts on consumer switching, these impacts varied significantly across the trials, suggesting that some interventions were more effective than others. Further, the overall impacts of the Ofgem trials were moderate, as around 70% of participants did not switch suppliers even in the most impactful trial. This reflects a general lack of understanding in the literature about the behaviour-influencing factors, their impacts, and their context-connects. By implication, the difficulty in stimulating consumer switching, as demonstrated by the Ofgem trials, suggests that weak consumer switching and the practice of price discrimination may simply reflect significant competition, rather than a lack of it, especially if retail margins are not greater than the competitive level. In this case, the communication-based intervention aimed at encouraging consumer switching may lead to further price discrimination, especially for the most vulnerable consumers, who are more likely to stay with their incumbent suppliers.