Dabo Guan

Tsinghua University | TH · Department of Earth System Science

The achievement of sustainable energy systems requires well-designed energy policies, particularly targeted strategies to plan the direction of energy development, regulations monitored and executed through credible authorities and laws enforced by the judicial system for the enhancement of actions and national targets. The Asia–Pacific region (APA...

The Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) is a national initiative aimed at building a world-class city cluster in China and whose trends, socioeconomic drivers of CO2 emissions, and mitigation pathways are of great significance to the high-quality regional economic development. This study compiled the CO2 emission inventories of the GBA...

本文通过构建基于投入产出框架的复合灾害经济影响评估模型, 研究了郑州"涝疫复合"突发事件在中国区域间产业链上的经济影响传播足迹及灾后经济恢复力的主要影响因素. 研究结果发现: 1)郑州"涝疫复合"事件的经济影响集中于郑州市内, 其中非金属矿物制品、食品和烟草是遭受间接损失最大且产业链辐射影响力最大的两个行业; 2)郑州洪灾恢复期间伴生的疫情风险使得灾后间接经济损失增加了77%, 并且改变了经济影响的空间和行业分布结构; 3)灾后经济恢复力对路面修复速率、重建效率和消费补贴的变化最敏感, 同时疫情管控会降低洪灾应急措施的边际经济收益. 本文建议复合灾害应对过程中, 政府应兼顾救灾、防疫与经济需求之间的平衡: 一方面依据动态防疫的需求变化审慎推进应急恢复工作; 另一方面, 结合产业结构和储蓄偏好...

East Africa is typical of the less developed economies that have emerged since the 21st century, whose brilliant economic miracle has also triggered the rapid growth of energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions. However, previous carbon accounting studies have never focused on the region. Based on multi-source data, this paper rebuilt the 45-...

Addressing emissions released from coal-fired power plants (CFPPs) is vital to mitigate climate change. China aims to replace 240 TWh CFPPs with fuel cell (FC) technologies by 2050 to achieve carbon-neutrality goals. However, FCs are not emission-free throughout their technology life cycle, and FC effectiveness will vary depending on the CFPP confi...

Populations in developed countries are ageing. However, the impact of senior citizens’ consumption on global carbon mitigation is poorly understood. Here we find that senior citizens have played a leading role in driving up GHG emissions in the past decade and are on the way to becoming the largest contributor. Considering the greenhouse gas footpr...

The input-output (IO) model is a powerful economic tool with many extended applications. However, one of the widely criticized drawbacks is its rather lengthy time lag in data preparation, making it impossible to apply IO in high-resolution time-series analysis. The conventional IO model is thus unfortunately unsuited for time-series analysis. In t...

Strict carbon emission regulations are set with respect to countries’ territorial seas or exclusive economic zone shipping activities to meet their climate change commitment under the Paris Agreement. However, no shipping carbon mitigation policies are proposed for the world high sea regions, which results in carbon intensive shipping activities on...

Cities are leading carbon mitigation but are heterogeneous in their mitigation policies due to different socioeconomic backgrounds. Given that cities are increasingly inextricably linked, formulating mitigation policies of different cities cannot be easily achieved without comprehensive carbon inventories, who taking the inter-city supply chains in...

Urban household consumption contributes substantially to global greenhouse gases (GHGs) emissions. Urban household emissions encompass both direct and indirect emissions, with the former associated with the direct use of fossil fuels and the latter with the emissions embodied in the consumed goods and services. However, there is a lack of consisten...

Ensuring a more equitable distribution of vaccines worldwide is an effective strategy to control the COVID-19 pandemic and support global economic recovery. Here, we analyze the socioeconomic effects - defined as health gains, lockdown-easing benefit, and supply-chain rebuilding benefit - of a set of idealized vaccine distribution scenarios, by cou...

Global production fragmentation generates indirect socioeconomic and environmental impacts throughout its expanded supply chains. The multi-regional input-output model (MRIO) is a tool commonly used to trace the supply chain and understand spillover effects across regions, but often cannot be applied due to data unavailability, especially at the su...

Service industries are generally considered “green” because of their marginal direct emissions; however, they account for 65% of the world gross domestic product and over 20% of total global trade in 2019. Here, we quantify the evolution of carbon emissions embodied in services trade from 2010 to 2018 and identify the driving factors of emission ch...

The shift of China’s economy since 2013, dubbed the “new normal”, has caused its production and consumption emissions to plateau, with the country seeming to embody the tantalising promise of decoupling its economic growth from carbon emissions. By using multi-region input-output analysis, we find that China’s relative decoupling in the new normal...

China has built the world’s largest power transmission infrastructure by consuming massive volumes of greenhouse gas- (GHG-) intensive products such as steel. A quantitative analysis of the carbon implications of expanding the transmission infrastructure would shed light on the trade-offs among three connected dimensions of sustainable development,...

Continuous expansion of fossil fuel-based energy infrastructure can be one of the key obstacles in delivering the Paris Agreement goals. The oil refinery is the world's third-largest stationary emitter of greenhouse gases (GHGs), but the historical mapping of the regional-specific refining industry, their CO2 emission patterns, and mitigation poten...

Constituent entities which make up Russia have wide-ranging powers and are considered as important policymakers and implementers of climate change mitigation. Formulation of CO 2 emission inventories for Russia’s constituent entities is the priority step in achieving emission reduction. Russia is the world’s largest exporter of oil and gas combined...

The estimation of China's future food grain demand has become vital input for designing grain security measures. Addressing the population's age-gender and urban-rural structures under three fertility policies scenarios together with concerns for balanced diets, we established a multi-factor driven model to forecast China's food grain demand (inclu...

Cities are pivotal hubs of socioeconomic activities, and consumption in cities contributes to global environmental pressures. Compiling city-level multi-regional input-output (MRIO) tables is challenging due to the scarcity of city-level data. Here we propose an entropy-based framework to construct city-level MRIO tables. We demonstrate the new con...

Unexpected events such as economic crises and natural disasters can have profound implications for energy systems and climate change mitigation efforts at different levels. Here we explore the national and regional carbon emission patterns (and their drivers) for the main economic sectors in Japan between 2007 and 2015, a period shaped by the 2008...

The potential impact of climate change on agriculture has been one of the most discussed topics in the literature on climate change. Although the possible impacts of climate change on crop yields have been widely studied, there remains little quantitative understanding of the heterogeneous economic responses to climate-induced crop yield changes in...

Floods are among the most frequent and costliest natural hazards. Fluvial flood losses are expected to increase in the future, driven by population and economic growth in flood-prone areas, and exacerbated in many regions by effects of climate change on the hydrological cycle. Yet, studies assessing direct and indirect economic impacts of fluvial f...

Background The health impacts of ambient air pollution impose large costs on society. Although all people are exposed to air pollution, the older population (ie, those aged ≥60 years) tends to be disproportionally affected. As a result, there is growing concern about the health impacts of air pollution as many countries undergo rapid population age...

Economic growth is principally powered by energy fuels. While the potential energy transition pathways in developed countries are clear, that has not been well explored for developing countries. Here, we study the average growth rate of 12 aggregated regions in 2001-2017, and the driving factors behind that growth. The countries with high growth ra...

The marine economic activities has become a vital economic driving force for development of China's economy. However, the trajectory of greenhouse gas (i.e. GHG) emissions associated the fast growing marine economy and its role in emission mitigation remain unclear. Through compiling high-resolution and time-series environmental input–output tables...

As the second most populous country in the world, India is on the way to rapid industrialization and urbanization, possibly becoming the next carbon giant. With its vast territory and high regional heterogeneity in terms of development stages and population, state-level consumption-based emissions patterns and driving forces are critical but unfort...

The environmental impacts of the fashion industry have been aroused wide concerns. The globalization and fragmentation of the textile and fashion system have led to the uneven distribution of environmental consequences. As denim is the fabric of jeans that is representative of fashion, this study assessed virtual carbon and water flows embodied in...

The growing energy consumption and associated carbon emission of Bitcoin mining could potentially undermine global sustainable efforts. By investigating carbon emission flows of Bitcoin blockchain operation in China with a simulation-based Bitcoin blockchain carbon emission model, we find that without any policy interventions, the annual energy con...

International efforts to avoid dangerous climate change have historically focused on reducing energy-related CO 2 emissions from countries with either the largest economies (e.g., the EU and the U.S.) and/or the largest populations (e.g., China and India). However, in recent years, emissions have surged among a different, much less-examined group o...

International efforts to avoid dangerous climate change have historically focused on reducing energy-related CO2 emissions from countries with either the largest economies (e.g., the EU and the U.S.) and/or the largest populations (e.g., China and India). However, in recent years, emissions have surged among a different and much less-examined group...

Mobility restrictions have been a heated topic during the global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). However, multiple recent findings have verified its importance in blocking virus spread. Evidence on the association between mobility, cases imported from abroad and local medical resource supplies is limited. To reveal the association,...

Recent increases in the frequency and scale of wildfires worldwide have raised concerns about the influence of climate change and associated socioeconomic costs. In the western United States, the hazard of wildfire has been increasing for decades. Here, we use a combination of physical, epidemiological and economic models to estimate the economic i...

The global economy is facing a serious recession due to COVID-19, with implications for CO2 emissions. Here, using a global adaptive multiregional input–output model and scenarios of lockdown and fiscal counter measures, we show that global emissions from economic sectors will decrease by 3.9 to 5.6% in 5 years (2020 to 2024) compared with a no-pan...

Air pollution is a major environmental issue in China and imposes severe health burdens on Chinese citizens. Consequently, China has deployed a series of control measures to mitigate fine particulate matter (PM2.5). However, the extent to which these measures have been effective is obscured by the existence of confounding meteorological effects. He...

As national efforts to reduce CO2 emissions intensify, policy-makers need increasingly specific, subnational information about the sources of CO2 and the potential reductions and economic implications of different possible policies. This is particularly true in China, a large and economically diverse country that has rapidly industrialized and urba...

China has implemented retrofitting measures in coal-fired power plants (CFPPs) to reduce air pollution through small unit shutdown, the installation of air pollution control devices (APCDs), and power generation efficiency improvement. The reductions in highly toxic Hg emissions and their related health impacts by these measures remain poorly under...

Changes in CO2 emissions during the COVID-19 pandemic have been estimated from indicators on activities like transportation and electricity generation. Here, we instead use satellite observations together with bottom-up information to track the daily dynamics of CO2 emissions during the pandemic. Unlike activity data, our observation-based analysis...

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-20254-5

Enterprises are at the forefront of climate actions and multinational enterprises (MNEs) engage in foreign direct investment, allowing them substantial influence over the entire supply chain. Yet emissions embodied in the international supply chains of MNEs are poorly known. Here we trace the carbon footprints of foreign affiliates of MNEs and show...

China’s industrial water withdrawal soared in the last decades and remained high. Stringent water management policies were set to save water through improving industrial withdrawal efficiency by 20% between 2015 and 2020. Although China has a nation-wide water scarcity, scarcity at city-level has not been fully explored. Thus, it is meaningful to u...

The EU27 countries exert significant influence on the global patterns of the CO2-Emissions-Water-Energy (CWE) nexus. However, whether the associated benefits are similar for all countries is unclear. In this paper, an EU27 multiregional input-output model, at a sector level to identify the inter-regional and -sectoral CWE flows, and clarify the reg...

This study seeks to estimate how global supply chain relocates emissions of tropospheric ozone precursors and its impacts in shaping ozone formation. Here we show that goods produced in China for foreign markets lead to an increase of domestic non-methane volatile organic compounds (NMVOCs) emissions by 3.5 million tons in 2013; about 13% of the na...

The COVID-19 pandemic is impacting human activities, and in turn energy use and carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions. Here we present daily estimates of country-level CO2 emissions for different sectors based on near-real-time activity data. The key result is an abrupt 8.8% decrease in global CO₂ emissions (−1551 Mt CO₂) in the first half of 2020 compare...

China's fossil-fuel CO2 (FFCO2) emissions accounted for approximately 28 % of the global total FFCO2 in 2016. An accurate estimate of China's FFCO2 emissions is a prerequisite for global and regional carbon budget analyses and the monitoring of carbon emission reduction efforts. However, significant uncertainties and discrepancies exist in estimati...

The spatial mismatch of energy resources and electricity demand in China drives the large-scale construction of power transmission infrastructure, which consumes a large amount of carbon-intensive products. However, a systematic accounting framework for the carbon emissions of power transmission infrastructure has not yet been established. This stu...

Emerging evidence suggests a resurgence of COVID-19 in the coming years. It is thus critical to optimize emergency response planning from a broad, integrated perspective. We developed a mathematical model incorporating climate-driven variation in community transmissions and movement-modulated spatial diffusions of COVID-19 into various intervention...

Future climate change may worsen air quality in many regions. However, evaluations of this ‘climate penalty’ on air quality have typically not assessed the radiative effects of changes in short-lived aerosols. Additionally, China’s clean air goals will decrease pollutant emissions and aerosol loadings, with concomitant weakening of aerosol feedback...

China has a rapidly growing online food delivery and takeaway market, serving 406 million customers with 10.0 billion orders and generating 323 kilotonnes of tableware and packaging waste in 2018. Here we use a top-down approach with city-level takeaway order data to explore the packaging waste and life-cycle environmental impacts of the takeaway i...

In 2018, a total of US$166 billion global economic losses and a new high of 55.3 Gt of CO2 equivalent emission were generated by 831 climate-related extreme events. As the world's largest CO2 emitter, we reported China's recent progresses and pitfalls in climate actions to achieve climate mitigation targets (i.e., limit warming to 1.5–2°C above the...