Yuli Shan

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Associate Professor at University of Birmingham

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...

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...

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...

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...

Cities, contributing more than 75% of global carbon emissions, are at the heart of climate change mitigation. Given cities' heterogeneity, they need specific low-carbon roadmaps instead of one-size-fits-all approaches. Here, we present the most detailed and up-to-date accounts of CO2 emissions for 294 cities in China and examine the extent to which...

Low-carbon lifestyles provide demand-side solutions to meet global climate targets, yet the global carbon-saving potential of consumer-led abatement actions remains insufficiently researched. Here, we quantify the greenhouse gas emissions reduction potential of 21 low-carbon expenditures using a global multi-regional input-output model linked with...

Water scarcity is a global challenge in many emerging economies, including China. China is one of the most extensive freshwater users and has set water efficiency improvement goals for 2030 at the prefecture level. However, no systematic water use and savings comparison exists across prefectures and sectors. Here, we used datasets of water withdraw...

Redeploying plants may mitigate climate risk and enhance renewable power generation. However, designing deployment strategies is complicated by the lack of plant‐level response between power generation and climate variables with the constraint of economic and social factors. Here, we develop three random‐forest (RF) response models that accurately...

Consumption behaviours exert pressure on water resources both locally and globally through interconnected supply chains, hindering the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals 6 (Clean water and sanitation) and 12 (Responsible consumption and production). However, it is challenging to link hotspots of water depletion across spatial scales to fi...

Wastewater treatment plays a crucial role in removing pollutants. Water conservation and reuse of wastewater help to reduce freshwater use and to alleviate water stress. However, the extent to which water conservation, wastewater treatment, and reuse can contribute to water stress mitigation is not clear. This study aims to investigate the impact o...

Consumption behaviors exert pressure on water resources both locally and globally through interconnected supply chains, hindering the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 6 (Clean water and sanitation) and 12 (Responsible consumption and production). However, it is challenging to link hotspots of water depletion across spatial scales...

As of May 2022, assets under management of these funds amount to 9.91 trillion USD. Hence, sovereign wealth funds have a significant influence on the financial system due to their substantial economic value. As the current practice of portfolio management is outdated, due to a lack of relevant input factors exploring environmental, social and gover...

Formulating equitable climate policies should not overlook the challenges faced by less developed regions. African countries are at a crucial stage of economic development and deeper integration into global trade. Therefore, understanding their carbon footprints (i.e., consumption‐based CO2 emissions) is essential for crafting a sustainable develop...

The COP28 agreement signals “beginning of the end” of the fossil fuel era, calling on countries to contribute to global efforts to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems in a just, orderly and equitable manner. While a quantitative assessment of country's vulnerability in energy transition is a prerequisite for national and internation...

Achieving European Green Deal (EGD) targets for carbon removal and ecological restoration would reduce agricultural and forestry production within the European Union yet simultaneously extend ecosystem impacts elsewhere. Here we quantify such spillover impacts by coupling an extended multi-regional input–output analysis with an agro-ecological zone...

How much and what we eat and where it is produced can create huge differences in GHG emissions. On the basis of detailed household-expenditure data, we evaluate the unequal distribution of dietary emissions from 140 food products in 139 countries or areas and further model changes in emissions of global diet shifts. Within countries, consumer group...

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...

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...

Cities are at the heart of climate change mitigation as they account for over 70% of global carbon emissions. However, cities vary in their energy systems and socioeconomic capacities to transition to renewable energy. To address this heterogeneity, this study proposes an Energy Transition Index (ETI) specifically designed for cities, and applies i...

The Paris Agreement and the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development provide the foundation for sustainable development under a changing climate. China is committed to its international responsibilities through a national plan on implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development as well as a commitment to reach peak carbon...

Emerging countries are at the frontier of climate change actions, and carbon emissions accounting provides a quantifiable measure of the environmental impact of economic activities, which allows for comparisons of emissions across different entities. However, currently there is no study covering detailed emissions inventories for emerging countries...

Crude oil pipelines are considered as the lifelines of energy industry. However, accidents of the pipelines can lead to severe public health and environmental concerns, in which greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, primarily methane, are frequently overlooked. While previous studies examined fugitive emissions in normal operation of crude oil pipelines,...

The significant spike in global energy prices induced by the Russian-Ukrainian (RU) conflict is perceived as highly uncertain that may rise household living costs and adversely affect Sustainable Development Goals such as poverty elimination. However, the impacts on human wellbeing are entirely obscured by conventional economic analyses. Using the...

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...

Resource-based cities are important strategic bases for securing resources in China and have made great contributions to the country’s economic development. Long-term extensive resource development has made resource-based cities an important region constraining China from achieving comprehensive low-carbon development. Therefore, it is of great sig...

The sustainability of life on Earth is under increasing threat due to human-induced climate change. This perilous change in the Earth's climate is caused by increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, primarily due to emissions associated with burning fossil fuels. Over the next two to three decades, the effects of cli...

Electrifying the transport sector is crucial for reducing CO2 emissions and achieving Paris Agreement targets. This largely depends on rapid decarbonization in power plants; however, we often overlook the trade-offs between reduced transportation emissions and additional energy-supply sector emissions induced by electrification. Here, we developed...

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions related to food consumption complement production-based or territorial accounts by capturing carbon leaked through trade. Here we evaluate global consumption-based food emissions between 2000 and 2019 and underlying drivers using a physical trade flow approach and structural decomposition analysis. In 2019, emissions...

The low-carbon power transition, which is key to combatting climate change, has far-reaching effects on achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in terms of issues such as resource use, environmental emissions, employment, and many more. Here, we assess the potential impacts of the power transition on progress toward achieving multiple SD...

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...

Natural gas is believed to be a critical transitional energy source. However, natural gas pipelines, once failed, will contribute to a large amount of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, including methane from uncontrolled natural gas venting and carbon dioxide from flared natural gas. However, the GHG emissions caused by pipeline incidents are not inc...

Capital assets such as machinery and infrastructure contribute substantially to CO2 emissions over their lifetime. Unique features of capital assets such as their long durability complicate the assignment of capital-associated CO2 emissions to final beneficiaries. Whereas conventional approaches allocate emissions required to produce capital assets...

Emerging economies are predicted to be future emission hotspots due to expected levels of urbanization and industrialization, and their CO2 emissions are receiving more scrutiny. However, the driving forces underlying dynamic change in emissions are poorly understood, despite their crucial role in developing targeted mitigating pathways. We firstly...

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...

Enterprises, as key emitters, play a vital role in promoting sustainable development. Corporate sustainability disclosure provides a key channel for stakeholders to gain insights into a company’s sustainability progress. However, few studies have been conducted to measure sustainability disclosure at the firm level. In this study, we apply the mach...

Since 2000, CO2 emissions from emerging economies have outstripped those of developed economies. To limit global warming to under 1.5 ∘C by 2100, over 100 emerging economies have proposed net-zero carbon targets. Yet the supportive data are lacking – no inventory of CO2 emission outlines detailed sources by sector or distribution at the subnational...

Mainland Southeast Asian (MSEA) countries (Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar, and Vietnam) are likely to become one of the next hotspots for emission reduction, since CO2 emissions in this area will have a two-thirds increase by 2040 due to rapid economy growth and associated energy consumption. As one of the most vulnerable areas to climate change...

Local government intervention in land resource allocation can lead to the misallocation of land resources and serious pollutant emissions. As an important market-oriented economic reform in China, the marketization of urban land transfer (MULT) might have the potential to contribute to improving resource allocation efficiency by curbing local gover...

The Russia–Ukraine conflict has triggered an energy crisis that directly affected household energy costs for heating, cooling and mobility and indirectly pushed up the costs of other goods and services throughout global supply chains. Here we bridge a global multi-regional input–output database with detailed household-expenditure data to model the...

Lead (Pb) pollution is a serious environmental and health risk and remains a major challenge for China. This study analyzes China’s atmospheric Pb emissions from the dual perspectives of production and final demand, by integrating localized emission factors and a Multi-Regional Input – Output model. Our results show that Shandong, Hebei, and Hubei...

In our globalized economy, the consumption of goods and services induces economic benefits but also environmental pressures and impacts around the world. Consumption levels are especially high in the current 27 member countries of the European Union (EU), which are some of the wealthiest economies in the world. Here, we determine the global distrib...

The mismatch between trade-embodied economic benefits and CO2 emissions causes carbon inequality, which is seldom analyzed from the intracountry level, especially across a long-term period. This study applied an environmentally extended multiregional input-output model to trace this mismatch and measure the carbon inequality quantitatively within C...

Since 2000, CO2 emissions from emerging economies have outstripped those of developed economies. To limit global warming to under 1.5 °C by 2100, over 100 emerging economies have proposed net-zero carbon targets. Yet the supportive data are lacking - no inventory of CO2 emissions outlines detailed sources by sector or distribution at the subnationa...

Cities’ transition from fossil-based systems of energy production and consumption to renewable energy sources--the energy transition, is critical to mitigating climate change impact as cities’ energy consumption and CO2 emissions account for two-thirds and over 70% of the world’s total, respectively. Given cities’ heterogeneity, they need specific...

Cities in China are on the frontline of low-carbon transition which requires monitoring city-level emissions with low-latency to support timely climate actions. Most existing CO2 emission inventories lag reality by more than one year and only provide annual totals. To improve the timeliness and temporal resolution of city-level emission inventories...

The vast cropland in China is an important carbon pool with substantial carbon sequestration potential. Here, this study estimated the soil organic carbon stock in China's croplands based on a comprehensive investigation of 7.5 million soil samples from 2209 counties. We show that China's croplands (0–20 cm) store 4.53–4.98 Pg organic carbon in tot...

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 o...

Achievement drive hypothesis indicates that individuals with higher facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR) are biologically associated with stronger achievement-drive incentives and are hence likely to exhibit better performance. In this study, we examine the relationship between editors' fWHR, an established proxy for achievement drive, and journal p...

Having constructed a unique dataset of consumption-based CO 2 emissions for 17 different types of fossil fuels, 46 sectors and 7 industrial processes at the city level for 285 Chinese prefectures and municipalities, we assess the causal impact of China's Low-carbon City Pilot (LCCP) on city-level CO 2 emissions and GDP CO 2 intensity over the perio...

A good understanding of household carbon emissions is an important part of forming climate mitigation strategies to achieve the goals set out in the Paris Agreement. Numerous studies have been carried out on emissions from household consumption and the inequality between urban and rural areas in high-income developed countries, but there is a lack...

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...

Low-carbon power transition, key to combatting climate change, brings far-reaching effects on achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in terms of resources use, environmental emissions, employment, and many more. Here we assess the potential impacts of power transition on multiple SDGs progress across 49 economies under six socio-economic-c...

Measurement(s) methane, nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide emissions from municipal wastewater treatment facilities Technology Type(s) computational modeling technique Factor Type(s) influent and effluent chemical oxygen demand (COD) mass • influent and effluent total nitrogen (TN) mass • removed COD • electricity consumption • emisison factors • was...

The largest 6,529 international corporations are accountable for almost 30% of global CO2e emissions. A growing awareness of the role of the corporate world in the path toward sustainability has led many shareholders and stakeholders to pursue increasingly stringent and ambitious environmental goals. However, how to assess the corporate environment...

China has implemented a series of measures to address air pollutants and carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants, which can mitigate toxic heavy metal emissions simultaneously. By integrating plant-level information and energy activity data, we investigated the co-benefits of clean air and low-carbon policies by compiling a detailed inventory...

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...

Environmental finance has gained considerable attention globally as an emerging interdisciplinary research area. This study uses bibliometric analysis to systematically review major studies on environmental finance-related areas published since the 1970s. Through a bibliometric analysis of 892 environmental finance-related articles sourced from the...

The ten countries that joined the European Union (EU) in 2004 (Cyprus, Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia) have experienced faster economic growth and slower declines in energy consumption than traditional EU members. As designing of low-carbon policies requires accurate CO2 emission accounting, this...

Participating in global value chains (GVCs) brings great economic benefits and carbon emissions in Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) countries. By combining the multi-region input-output table with regression models and conducting a series of robustness tests, this study examines the impact of GVCs participation on carbon intensity in BRI countries du...

The coronavirus pandemic has severely impacted our day-to-day activities and brought about significant change in all major sectors, especially surface passenger transport. Lockdowns and stay-at-home restrictions have significantly reduced energy demand and consequently CO 2 emissions of surface passenger transport. The change in CO 2 emissions is c...

Improving energy efficiency is essential for energy conservation, emissions reduction, and sustainable development. Prevalent huge efficiency gaps are not advantageous for the improvement of the region's overall energy efficiency. Although studies have analyzed the influencing factors of the regional energy efficiency gap, the impact of regional in...

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-...

This paper develops a multi-sector and multi-factor structural gravity model that allows an analytical and quantitative decomposition of the emission and output changes into composition and technique effects. We find that the negative production shock of China’s containment policy propagates globally via supply chains, with the carbon-intensive sec...

Unprecedented pace of urbanization and industrialization caused a massive increase in China’s urban metabolic pressure. The trend presents an urgent challenge for detailing the long-term changes and disparities in urban metabolic performances in a wide range of cities. Here, we present empirical evidence of 283 China’s cities from 2000 to 2018 base...

Wealth and income are disproportionately distributed among the global population. This has direct consequences on consumption patterns and consumption-based carbon footprints, resulting in carbon inequality. Due to persistent inequality, millions of people still live in poverty today. On the basis of global expenditure data, we compute country- and...

Low-carbon economic development is at the heart of the post-pandemic green recovery scheme worldwide. It requires economic recovery without compromising on the environment, implying a critical role that green productivity plays in achieving the carbon neutrality goal. Green productivity measures the quality of economic growth with consideration for...

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...

The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are the blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future. To achieve the goal, tracking progress — not just on a national level, but locally — is crucial to guide future policy development. While sustainability assessment at the national evel is quite advanced in China, similar assessments focusi...

Low-carbon power transition, key to combatting climate change, brings far-reaching effects on achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in terms of resources use, environmental emissions, employment, and many more. Here we assessed the potential impacts of power transition on 49 regional multiple SDGs progress under three different climate sc...

The COVID-19 pandemic has created significant challenges for energy transition. Concerns about the overwhelming emphasis on economic recovery at the cost of energy transition progress have been raised worldwide. More voices are calling for "green" recovery scheme, which recovers the economy while not compromising on the environment. However, limite...