Environmental responsibility for sulfur dioxide emissions and associated biodiversity loss across Chinese provinces

Recent years have witnessed a growing volume in Chinese interregional trade, along with the increasing disparities in environmental pressures. This has prompted an increased attention on where the responsibilities for environmental impacts should be placed. In this paper, we quantify the environmental responsibility of SO₂ emissions and biodiversity impacts due to terrestrial acidification at the provincial level for the first time. We examine the environmental responsibility from the perspectives of production, consumption, and income generation by employing a Multi-Regional Input-Output (MRIO) model for 2007, 2010, and 2012. The results indicate that ∼40% of SO₂ emissions were driven by the consumption in provinces other than where the emissions discharged. In particular, those developed provinces were net importers of SO₂ emissions and mainly outsourced their emissions to nearby developing provinces. Over the period of analysis, environmental inequality among 30 provinces was larger than GDP inequality. Furthermore, environmental inequality continued to increase while GDP inequality decreased over the time period. The results of a shared income- and consumption-based responsibility approach suggest that the environmental responsibility of SO₂ emissions and biodiversity impacts for developed provinces can reach up to ∼4- to 93-fold the environmental pressure occurred within those provinces. This indicates that under these accounting principles the developed northern provinces in China would bear a much larger share of the environmental responsibility.