X.D. Wu

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Associated Professor at Beijing Forestry University

As an extension of a previous work (Chen and Han, 2015a), this study explored the arable land use of the world economy from source of exploitation to sink of final consumption via the global supply chain, by means of embodiment accounting that includes the indirect feedbacks associated with both intermediate and primary inputs. In magnitude, the gl...

To reflect a key aspect of global socio-hydrology, this paper explores global virtual water use from source of exploitation to sink of final consumption via interregional trades within the world economy as reflected by world input-output database for 2014. An embodiment accounting model is developed, which takes full account of virtual water feedba...

Solar power has been widely treated as renewable and carbon-neutral for being free of fossil resource inputs and causing no carbon emissions. Recent studies, however, qualitatively challenged the traditional thinking derived under a local-realism-based perspective. In response to the recent concerns, this study as a continuation of a previous work...

Globalization has characterized geo-economic integrations of world regions via South-South, North-North, and South-North trades, which play a critical role in displacing global greenhouse gas emissions. Based on the global CH4 emission inventories from the EDGAR database and the global multi-region input-output accounts from the EORA database, this...

This paper conducts a systematic accounting on the use of China’s pastureland in the world economy by using systems embodiment analysis. This study is in direct association with a pioneering paper “Embodied pasture land use change in China 2000–2015: from the perspective of globalization” (Guo et al., 2019). Both the previous and the present work e...

China’s croplands are facing serious threats from soil erosion, calling for long-term and spatially explicit assessment to safeguard food security and promote sustainable land use management. Yet limited attention has been directed to examining high-resolution spatial cropland-related soil erosion in China over an extended time span, especially acr...

Accumulated carbon storage is a crucial indicator for assessing the health of mangrove ecosystems and can suitably reflect the changes in the carbon sequestration capacity of mangrove forests over time. Unlike carbon stock for a specific year, accumulated carbon storage measures the capacity for continuous carbon sequestration in mangroves; however...

As a key industrial production base in China, Yellow River Belt regions are faced with immense pressure on their groundwater resources. Revealing the socio-hydrological dynamics of groundwater resources in the context of regional economic integration is essential for formulating sustainable water use. As an important aspect to reflect the socio-hyd...

With rising extreme weather events due to climate change, the impact on agricultural production has become increasingly severe. Yet, there has been a significant gap in research that assesses the influence of day-to-day temperature variability on agricultural productivity on a global scale. Our study addresses this gap by exploring the effects of d...

The livestock sector represents major challenges to safeguarding environmental integrity. This study comprehensively analyzes ten environmental footprints of the livestock sector from 1995 to 2022, with projections until 2030, and juxtaposes them with the planetary boundaries. We quantify greenhouse gas emissions, land use, water use, particulate m...

A fine global future land use/land cover (LULC) is critical for demonstrating the geographic heterogeneity of earth system dynamics and human-earth interaction. In this study, we produced a 1 km global future LULC dataset that takes into account future climate and socio-economic changes as well as the impact of simulated results of the former year...

China’s forest ecosystem service supply has faced intense pressure during the last few decades, calling for a unified valuation on a long timescale to reveal its temporal and spatial changes. Yet, existing studies are confined to static valuations for a single year at the regional scale, while a temporal–spatial investigation for the ecosystem serv...

Globalization drives anthropogenic methane (CH 4) emissions from upstream to downstream agents through global supply chains. However, previous studies have overlooked the indirect CH 4 emissions enabled by primary suppliers. In this study, we use the Ghosh Multi-Regional Input-Output (MRIO) model and Structural Decomposition Analysis (SDA) to explo...

Achieving the ambitious Global Methane Pledge announced in the Glasgow Climate Pact requires collaborative efforts from both the signatory countries and China which serves as the world's largest emitter. Considering the heterogeneity of economic structures within China and the relocation of emissions between regions via the global economic network,...

The livestock sector represents major challenges to safeguarding environmental integrity. Therefore, we comprehensively analyze twelve environmental impacts of the livestock sector from 1995 to 2016 and project them until 2030. Our findings show livestock production impacts land resources, freshwater use, energy demand, climate change, nitrogen and...

The continuing urbanization and economic integration in the Yellow River regions have characterized a new form of arable land use that can be displaced as commodity embodiment through trade connections. To enunciate whether the Yellow River regions utilize their arable land resources to feed China, this work investigates the geographical displaceme...

Pastureland used for livestock grazing is globally much bigger than arable land. This study investigates the pastureland use embedded in global supply chains by using multi-regional systems input-output anlysis, tracing embodied pastureland use from source of exploitation to sink of final consumption in the global economy. The world's pastureland r...

In the context of severe water shortage and water pollution, wastewater treatment plays an important role in recycling water resources and improving water quality. Renewability of the wastewater treatment system as reflected by the water cost for water purification is revealed by a case investigation of a typical wastewater treatment plant in China...

As an extension of our previous work (Wu et al., 2019b), this study uses a positive accounting manner to track the circulation of energy use via interregional trade, by taking a full account of indirect energy usage related with primary inputs as well as intermediate inputs. The aggregate amount of interregional shift of energy use is about six tim...

Although solar photovoltaic systems do not emit greenhouse gases (GHG) during their operation lifetime, their manufacturing, transportation, and construction involves energy use and GHG emissions. In this study a life cycle assessment as well as economics analysis of the solar modules from manufacturing to delivery of the final product were evaluat...

Land occupation by solar power installations has become a rising concern that may cause adverse impacts on natural ecosystems and biodiversity. Existing studies mainly adopt a local perspective to view land use requirements of solar power and forget that the solar-based electricity system is subordinate to the macro economy and nourished by the mat...

By combining the latest statistics for the global economy in 2015, this study as a continuation of our previous work (Wu et al., 2020) investigates the extended carbon footprint of world regions and the emission transfer via commodity trade, by including both primary and intermediate inputs into consideration. The extended carbon footprint of the U...

Compared with centralized wastewater treatment systems, constructed wetlands are generally regarded as not suitable for wide deployment due to the comparatively larger direct land area. Much of the traditional thinking is based on an onsite perspective, while the offsite information is left out. By a comparative case study with systems accounting o...

With the expansion of economic globalization and the growth of international trade, the pulling effect of household consumption to global anthropogenic CH4 emissions related to production activities is becoming increasingly evident. This paper adopts a new perspective from the household-consumption side to investigate the CH4 emissions of major eco...

With the increasingly frequent interregional trade that leads to the geographical separation of production and consumption, the invisible shift of the environmental welfare bestowed by biomass use is brought to attention. Using a systems embodiment accounting model, this study tracked the dynamic process of interregional transfer of biomass use fro...

A unified ecological assessment is carried out for the 1.5 MW Dahan solar tower power plant in Beijing, by means a thermodynamic approach based on exergy. This study for the first time inventoried a most detailed list of the renewable and nonrenewable inputs of a pilot solar concentrating plant, which are traced to a sufficient detail to be matched...

As the major primary energy importer in the world, China has engaged in considerable efforts to ensure energy security. However, little attention has been paid to China’s embodied primary energy exports. Separating the international export from regional final demand, this paper focuses on quantifying provincial primary energy requirement arising fr...

To reflect an important aspect of the water footprint of thermal power in China, this study as an extension of a previous work (Wu et al., 2018a) uncovers the high amount of industrial water use induced by plant infrastructure of a typical coal-fired power generation system. The systems process method is used by combining process analysis and water...

Based on an extensive review of related studies, the striking amount of carbon emissions induced by the construction stage of a typical 2 × 660 MW coal-fired power generation system is revealed, by means of systems LCA as a concrete hybrid of process analysis and input-output analysis. Differing from previous works that simply treat the whole input...

Studying solute dispersion in channel flows is of significance for environmental and industrial applications. Two-dimensional concentration distribution for a most typical case of a point source release on the free water surface in a channel flow with bed absorption is presented by means of Chatwin's long-time asymptotic technique. Five basic chara...

To mirror an important aspect of ultra-high voltage network development, the remarkable amount of energy cost and carbon emissions of a typical ultra-high voltage transformer substation in China is revealed, in light of the hybrid method as the integration of input-output analysis and process analysis. By inclusively inventorying all the input item...

A crucial aspect of the energy and water nexus is reflected with the revelation of the surprisingly high amount of industrial water use induced by plant infrastructure of a pilot solar power generation system in China, by means of a concrete hybrid of process analysis and Input-Output analysis. With an inclusive collection of all the input items as...

By means of the three-scale input-output analysis, this study, taking Hebei Province in China as a case work, analyzes the water use in the provincial district and compares that between regional and urban economies. To the best of our knowledge, this paper pioneers providing a multi-scale perspective in a spectrum from global, national and regional...

With the accelerating coordinated development of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, regional economic integration is recognized as a national strategy. As water scarcity places Hebei Province in a dilemma, it is of critical importance for Hebei Province to balance water resources as well as make full use of its unique advantages in the transition to...

Transmission infrastructure is an integral component of safeguarding the stability of electricity delivery. However, existing studies of transmission infrastructure mostly rely on a simple review of the network, while the analysis of investments remains rudimentary. This study conducted the first regionally focused analysis of investments in transm...

Abstract A parametrical analysis on solute transport in a packed pipe with first-order wall reaction based on the method of Gill's series solution is presented. The main contribution of this work is to demonstrate the dispersion of solute cloud in different superficial flow in porous media, in particular, the evolution of the solute cloud in large...

Virtual water consumption accounting for an entire building construction engineering project including nine sub-projects is presented in this study to reveal the full picture of water consumption in building construction engineering. With the most comprehensive first-hand project data, this study is the first attempt to quantify a whole engineering...

Presented in this paper is a multi-scale analysis for environmental dispersion in a three-layer wetland for predicting the critical length of contaminant cloud that derives from instantaneous emission. The analysis of dependence of the dispersivity on characteristic parameters is determined. Longitudinal concentration distribution centered at the o...

Energy-related greenhouse gas emission is emerging as a major concern to be addressed. The structure of the urban economy, as the center of energy consumption, has therefore arrested widespread attention on the globe. By employing input–output model as a dynamic approach to simulate urban metabolism processes, structure decomposition analysis is un...

Based on a comprehensive review of the different biomass energy technologies in China, a hybrid evaluation model founding on Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is proposed to offer a comprehensive evaluation of a variety of biomass energy technologies in China. In this model, three evaluation criteria, including the applicability of technology, econo...

Integrated biogas utilization has experienced a rapid development in recent years in rural China, for both renewable energy production and waste treatment. On the basis of a modified Ecological Footprint (EF) indicator, this paper provides a comprehensive assessment of a “pig-biogas-fish” system, a typical household integrated biogas-utilization sy...

With the surging carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions worldwide and the huge energy demand, Chinese government has adopted many strategies to ensure energy security and to slash CO2 emissions, including renewable energy and CCS (carbon capture and storage) technology. A comparative work on CCS and renewable energy technology is conducted in terms of tech...

Hydropower fuels the overall societal development by contributing a notable proportion to the whole global power generation. Although much attention has been paid to the development of hydropower, few of them attempted to gather global systematic data and conduct a large-scale review of scientific studies. In such situation, a bibliometric approach...

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has drawn worldwide attentions as a low-carbon technology alternative. Though China is deemed as a key player in the global context to slash CO2, the future of CCS in China is still highly uncertain. This study presents an overview for CCS development in China and gives detailed analyses on strengths, weaknesses, op...