Environmental implications of economic transformation in China's Pearl River Delta region: Dynamics at four nested geographical scales over 1987–2017

Abstract

Environmental pollution in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region is largely driven by socioeconomic forces outside the region as vast majority of manufacturing products produced in the region are destined to national and international markets. Given the remarkable economic transformation of the PRD in the past decades, this study investigates the impacts of local, provincial, national, and global socio-economic drivers on PRD's pollution dynamics under the background of significant economic restructuring and upgrading from 1987 to 2017. The results indicate that changes in pollution pattern were deeply shaped by the economic transformation. The share of PRD's emissions driven by international exports expanded significantly before 2007 as a result of the fast growth of international exports. The transformation of economic growth to domestic consumption driven model since the 2007–2008 global financial crisis had resulted in an increasing contribution share to the PRD's environmental pollution from local demand and trade with Rest of China (RoC). Similarly, as final demand structure evolving towards the high value-added manufacturing and services, the share of emissions driven by low value-added manufacturing (LVM) demand had decreased by an enlarged margin, while that driven by high value-added manufacturing (HVM) demand and services demand had moved in the opposite direction. The structural decomposition analysis shows that reduction in emission intensity remains the most effective way in pollution alleviation. The contribution of changes in production input structure also shifted from a strong impetus force before 2007 to a mitigating force afterwards due to significant technological progresses in the industrial sectors since the global financial crisis. With the marginal cost of reducing emission intensity becoming prohibitively expensive, the optimization of production structure and consumption pattern is likely to play more important role in future emission mitigation.