Heran Zheng

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Verified

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• PhD
• Lecturer at University College London

Trade-related declines in mangrove forest cover have raised global concern for decades, given the numerous ecosystem services mangrove forests can provide. However, there has yet to be a comprehensive evaluation of the relationship between mangrove loss and global supply chains. This study presents an assessment of mangrove loss footprint, defined...

Landfills play a crucial role in urban climate solutions, as the decomposition of their “hidden” carbon stock contributes to 8.8% of global methane emissions. While controlling landfill gas emissions is the most commonly used intervention, a systematic approach to manage the carbon cycle in landfills remains elusive. In this study, we developed a q...

The many complex interconnections among countries driven by natural and socioeconomic processes have a crucial impact on regional and global sustainability, yet a robust and systematic way to quantify this impact is lacking. Here we introduce two complementary approaches to bridge this key methodological gap. The first entails constructing a new su...

Sustainable development depends on the integration of the economy, society, and environment. Yet, escalating environmental challenges pose threats to both society and the economy. Despite progress in addressing environmental issues to promote sustainability, knowledge gaps in scientific research, technological advancement, engineering practice, and...

Outsourced carbon mitigation between cities means that some cities benefit from the carbon mitigation efforts of other cities more than their own. This problem conceals the recognition of cities’ mitigation contributions. Here we quantify local and outsourced carbon mitigation levels from 2012 to 2017 and identified ‘outsourced mitigation beneficia...

As the fourth largest CO2 emitter, Russia's constituent entities collectively contribute with vast territory and regional heterogeneity. Existing studies only present production‐based inventories; state‐level consumption‐based emissions patterns and driving forces remain rare. Here, we built the Russia state‐level Multi‐regional input‐output table...

In the context of China’s freshwater crisis high-resolution data are critical for sustainable water management and economic growth. Yet there is a dearth of data on water withdrawal and scarcity regardless of whether total or subsector amount, for prefectural cities. In administrative and territorial scope, we accounted for water withdrawal of all...

Addressing the total energy cost burden of elderly people is essential for designing equitable and effective energy policies, especially in responding to energy crisis in an aging society. It is due to the double impact of energy price hikes on households—through direct impact on fuel bills and indirect impact on the prices of goods and services co...

Emerging economies, low- and middle-income countries experiencing rapid population and GDP growth, face the challenge of improving their living standards while stabilizing CO2 emissions to meet net-zero goals. In this study, we quantify the CO2 emissions required for achieving decent living standards (DLS) in emerging economies. The results show th...

Carbon pricing is a core climate policy in many countries. However, the distribution of impacts is highly unequal across income brackets, but also across household types and regions. The complex interplay between household characteristics and location specific factors such as building stock and transport infrastructure considerably hampers our unde...

Chinese cities are core in the national carbon mitigation and largely affect global decarbonisation initiatives, yet disparities between cities challenge country-wide progress. Low-carbon transition should preferably lead to a convergence of both equity and mitigation targets among cities. Inter-city supply chains that link the production and consu...

Understanding the impact of climate fiscal policies on vulnerable groups is a prerequisite for equitable climate mitigation. However, there has been a lack of attention to the impacts of such policies on the elderly, especially the low-income elderly, in existing climate policy literature. Here, we quantify and compare the distributional impacts of...

The Basel Convention and prior studies mainly focused on the physical transboundary movements of hazardous waste (transporting waste from one region to another for cheaper disposal). Here, we take China, the world’s largest waste producer, as an example and reveal the virtual hazardous waste flows in trade (outsourcing waste by importing waste-inte...

To achieve carbon neutrality (i.e., net zero carbon emissions) by 2060, China must make significant changes in its socioeconomic systems, including appropriately allocating emissions responsibility. Traditional methods of delineating responsibilities (such as production-based and consumption-based accounting) can lead to double counting when applie...

The continued loss of unfragmented intact forest landscapes (IFLs) despite numerous global conservation initiatives indicates the need for improved knowledge of proximate and underlying drivers. Yet the role of non-agricultural activities in forest degradation and fragmentation has not received adequate attention. We focus on IFL loss caused by var...

China's air pollution policies prioritize city heterogeneity, and launch the one-city-one-policy framework. Production fragmentation extends air pollution policies beyond the local scale. Therefore, air pollution needs to be controlled in coordination between cities rather than individually, considering the pollution embodied in supply chains. We i...

China is playing an increasing role in global climate change mitigation, and local authorities need more city-specific information on the emissions trends and patterns when designing low-carbon policies. This study provides the most comprehensive CO2 emission inventories of 287 Chinese cities from 2001 to 2019. The emission inventories are compiled...

China has been undergoing an industrial transformation, shifting from an energy-intensive growth pattern. As the most developed region in China, the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) city cluster is leading the industrial transformation. However, the impact of the industrial transformation on carbon footprints in the YRD cities is unclear. By a city-level...

Multi‐regional input–output (MRIO) models are widely used to analyze the economic interdependencies between regions in the context of global trade and environmental research. MRIO tables enable us to teleconnect the sectors in different regions along the supply chain and track both direct and indirect impacts of global production. Yet emerging econ...

China's urban population will increase by 268 million from 2010 to 2030, with the consumption of a large number of resource‐intensive products. Quantitative analysis of the environmental impacts (water, energy and carbon) of urban agglomerations can make trade‐offs among water conservation, energy use, climate change mitigation, and urban developme...

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...

Energy and water shortages are two major problems in the process of urban development, and meeting the demands for energy and fresh water has become the key to global sustainable development. In this study, we developed a structure-based singular value decomposition (SSVD) model through incorporating techniques of multi-regional input-output (MRIO)...

City-level CO2 emissions inventories are foundational for supporting the EU's decarbonization goals. Inventories are essential for priority setting and for estimating impacts from the decarbonization transition. Here we present a new CO2 emissions inventory for all 116 572 municipal and local-government units in Europe, containing 108 000 cities at...

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...

A large proportion of carbon emissions emitted by human activities is from the household sector. Efforts to control such carbon emissions need a timely accounting. We attempt to establish a rapid accounting China Carbon Watch (CCW) system, through which we use an alternative solution for accounting household carbon emissions in China by applying mo...

Since the 2008 financial crisis, China has been undergoing an economic transition consisting of prioritizing green economic and sustainable development instead of rapid growth driven by large‐scale investment. However, there is still a lack of fine print on how subregional effort can contribute to national or full supply chain mitigation plans, esp...

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...

City-level CO2 emissions inventories are foundational for supporting the EU’s decarbonization goals. Inventories are essential for priority setting and for estimating impacts from the decarbonization transition. Here we present a new CO2 emissions inventory for 116,572 municipal and local government units in Europe. The inventory spatially disaggre...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 rise of global value chains (GCVs) has seen the transfer of carbon emissions embodied in every step of international trade. Building a coordinated, inclusive and green GCV can be an effective and efficient way to achieve carbon emissions mitigation targets for countries that participate highly in GCVs. In this paper, we first describe the energ...

In the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Japan largely moved away from nuclear power generation and turned back towards an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels. As a result, the pace towards reaching emission reduction targets has largely slowed down. This situation indicates that higher emissions will continue to be generated if there is...

China has entered the economic transition in the post-financial crisis era, with unprecedented new features that significantly lead to a decline in its carbon emissions. However, regional disparity implies different trajectories in regional decarbonisation. Here, we construct multi-regional input–output tables (MRIO) for 2012 and 2015 and quantitat...

Production globalization, which is when firms expand their supply chains across national boundaries, creates an opportunity for developing countries to engage in international production networks via trade. Described as the world's factory, China specializes in assembly manufacturing mainly through processing exports. Firms use imported intermediat...

To protect the global ecological environment and prevent threats to human safety and property, nations around the world have invested heavily in ecological restoration programmes. However, we do not know whether these investments have been repaid by the resultant benefits. To answer this question, we developed an improved method of quantifying cost...

Urban areas consume more than 66% of the world's energy and generate more than 70% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. With the world's population expected to reach 10 billion by 2100, and with nearly 90% of people living in urban areas, a critical question for planetary sustainability is how the size of cities affects energy use and carbon d...

In the context of the freshwater crisis, accounting for water withdrawal could help planners better regulate water use in different sectors to combat water scarcity. However, the water withdrawal statistics in China are patchy, and the water data across all sectors at the city level appear to be relatively insufficient. Hence, we develop a general...

China has the largest number of industrial parks in the world. These parks are not only crucial for the country to accelerate industrialization but also to achieve its climate change targets. Constructing CO2 emission inventories for industrial parks is the first step in analysing the park’s emission patterns and designing low-carbon policies. Howe...

China's steel sector, contributing 40% of world steel production, are moving the plants out of highly-populated areas in China. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is an important technology to achieve a deep reduction of emissions in steel plants. Given by high cost and lack of policy incentive in deploying the CCS process, there has been a lack of p...

Our future is urban. With more than two-thirds of the global population expected to live in cities by 2050, urban sustainability is an essential part of sustainable development but remains poorly understood for urban agglomerations, which continue to develop and grow. Here, we construct a multiregional input-output table at the city level and inves...

The first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol came to an end in 2012 and more developing countries began to participate in the new phase of world carbon emission reduction. Kazakhstan is an important energy export country and a pivot of the "Belt and Road Initiative" (BRI). Despite its emissions are relatively small compared with huge emitters...

Plain Language Summary Located in the most western part of China and the world's highest plateau known as Qinghai‐Tibet Plateau, Tibet, plays a unique role in the global ecosystem and climate. Nevertheless, we did not know much about the emissions from human activities in this region. Under China's fast development of western provinces and Tibet's...

Jiamin Ou is a PhD student at the University of East Anglia, UK. She is the winner of the 2018 YSSP Mihalevich Award, given by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. Her research focus is energy and ozone pollution in China from a consumption-based perspective. Heran Zheng is a PhD student at University of East Anglia, UK. He spe...

In Northwest China, quantifying city-level CO 2 emissions is fundamental to CO 2 alleviation but encounters difficulties in data availability and quality. Further, structuring city-level emissions could be conductive to CO 2 reduction. This study applies a practical methodology to 16 northwestern Chinese cities to grasp their historical trajectorie...

Multiregion input–output (MRIO) models have become increasingly important in economic and environmental analysis. However, the current resolution of most MRIO models fails to capture the heterogeneity between subregions, especially in cities. The lack of city‐level MRIO tables has impeded the accomplishment of city‐level studies and hampered the un...

Water-energy nexus in a city can either prompt or undermine its development. Yet in China, the relevant research is rarely found. This study accounts the city-level water-energy nexus in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region in 2012 from both production and consumption perspectives, where input-output analysis based on city-level input-output tables are app...

In recent years, evaluating the emissions embodied in trade (EEIT) has become an important area of policy and research. Multiregional input-output (MRIO) analysis, which links producers and final consumers, is a widely-used method for quantifying the EEIT. However, the role of intermediate trade in driving changes in the EEIT is still not fully inc...

Design Type(s) source-based data transformation objective Measurement Type(s) Socioeconomic Factors Technology Type(s) computational modeling technique Factor Type(s) geographic location Sample Characteristic(s) Municipality of Beijing • Municipality of Tianjin • Hebei Province • Shanxi Province • Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region • Liaoning Provinc...

Energy consumption is one of main reasons for global warming and highly correlated with economic development. As the largest energy consumer worldwide, China has entered a new economic development model-the "new normal." This study aims to explore the pattern shift in China's energy consumption growth in this new development phase. We use structura...

Frequent modifications to energy statistics have led to considerable uncertainty in China's ability to achieve its carbon mitigation targets. Here, we quantitatively measure the impact of energy data revisions on China's ability to achieve its mitigation targets. Our results indicate the following effects of data revisions: 1. Mitigation challenges...

China is the world’s top energy consumer and CO2 emitter, accounting for 30% of global emissions. Compiling an accurate accounting of China’s CO2 emissions is the first step in implementing reduction policies. However, no annual, officially published emissions data exist for China. The current emissions estimated by academic institutes and scholars...

With the Rise of Central China Plan, the central region has had a great opportunity to develop its economy and improve its original industrial structure. However, this region is also under pressure to protect its environment, keep its development sustainable and reduce carbon emissions. Therefore, accurately estimating the temporal and spatial dyna...

Because of its low level of energy consumption and the small scale of its industrial development, the Tibet Autonomous Region has historically been excluded from China’s reported energy statistics, including those regarding CO2 emissions. In this paper, we estimate Tibet’s energy consumption using limited online documents, and we calculate the 2014...

Climate change adaptation and poverty alleviation call for an integrated strategy, because poverty exacerbates the vulnerability to climate change and vice versa. The private sector, which has traditionally been excluded from adaptation planning, may contribute greatly to the development of an integrated strategy. Here, we identify the differences...

Recognizing the connections between a culture and its environment provides an important perspective on a neglected aspect of coupled natural and social systems. Based on the history of grassland degradation in Northern China, we found that cultural invasions (the replacement of an indigenous culture by an invading population’s culture) have profoun...

An intriguing feature of China’s rapid socioeconomic development during the past 30 years is the new path it appears to represent for other developing countries. Unfortunately, the risks associated with China’s model are severe; they include a growing gap between the rich and poor caused by an unbalanced supply of social welfare, environmental degr...

Environmental degradation and poverty are linked, and this means that conservation and poverty reduction must be tackled together. However, finding a successful integrated strategy has been an elusive goal. We describe the career of a Chinese scholar, Shixiong Cao, whose persistent efforts to find and follow win-win paths have led to ecological res...

China has among the highest biodiversities in the world, but faces extreme biodiversity losses due to the country's huge population and its recent explosive socioeconomic development. Despite huge efforts and investments by the government and Chinese society to conserve biodiversity, especially in recent decades, biodiversity losses may not have be...