Wei Zhang

China's Rural Clean Heating Policy (RCHP) is confronted with affordability issues in terms of the increasing household heating costs against the background of subsidies phase out, calling for economically feasible strategies to alleviate the heating burden. By compiling a high-resolution township-level RCHP retrofitting dataset, here we comprehensively assessed the rural residential heating burdens, with or without operational subsidies, and further explored the economically viable clean heating strategies in Northern China. We show that eliminating subsidies would significantly increase rural residential heating expenditure by 36.2% (an average of 523.3 CNY per household), and low-income rural residents in Shandong and Shanxi would bear the most significant increase in heating burdens. The incremental heating costs can be partly offset (18.7%) by RCHP's carbon reduction credits in the context of the Chinese Certified Emission Reduction. Rural rooftop photovoltaics show significant potential in increasing household revenue, particularly in Hebei, Shanxi, and Beijing, where they can compensate for an average of 32.2–64.5% of the increased heating costs. The implementation of tailored subsidy phase-out strategies, coupled with the promotion of distributed PV projects, could enhance the sustainability of clean heating in China.

Efforts on climate change have demonstrated tangible impacts through various actions and policies. However, a significant knowledge gap remains: comparing the stringency of climate change policies over time or across jurisdictions is challenging due to ambiguous definitions, the lack of a unified assessment framework, complex causal effects, and the difficulty in achieving effective measurement. Furthermore, China’s climate governance is expected to address multiple objectives by integrating main effects and side effects, to achieve synergies that encompass environmental, economic, and social impacts. This paper employs an integrated framework comprising lexicon, text analysis, machine learning, and large-language model applied to multi-source data to quantify China’s policy stringency on climate change (PSCC) from 1954 to 2022. To achieve effective, robust, and explainable measurement, Chain-of-Thought and SHAP analysis are integrated into the framework. By framing the PSCC on varied sub-dimensions covering mitigation, adaptation, implementation, and spatial difference, this dataset maps the government’s varied stringency on climate change and can be used as a robust variable to support a series of downstream causal analysis.

Identification of the spatial distribution, driving forces, and future trends of agricultural methane (AGM) emissions is necessary to develop differentiated emission control pathways and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060 in China, which is the largest emitter of AGM. However, such research is currently lacking. Here, we estimated China's AGM emissions from 2010 to 2020 and then decomposed six factors that affect AGM emissions via the LMDI model. The results indicated that the AGM emissions in China in 2020 were 23.39 Tg, with enteric fermentation being the largest source, accounting for 43.9% of the total emissions. A total of 39.3% of the AGM emissions were from western China. The main driver of AGM emission reduction was emission intensity, accounting for 59% and 33.7% of methane emission reduction in the livestock sector and rice cultivation, respectively. Additionally, higher levels of urbanization contributed to AGM emission reductions, accounting for 31.3% and 43.0% of the livestock sector and rice cultivation emission reductions, respectively. Based on the SSP-RCP scenarios, we found that China's AGM emissions in 2060 were reduced by approximately 90% through a combination of technology measures, behavioral changes, and innovation policies. Our study provides a scientific basis for optimizing existing AGM emission reduction policies not only in China but also potentially in other high AGM-emitting countries, such as India and Brazil.

North China faces severe groundwater overdraft because of unsustainable groundwater use. However, consumers of local groundwater have rarely been precisely delineated. As such, identifying external consumers of groundwater‐intensive products may promote targeted policies from the consumption side, especially for the most water‐scarce Beijing‐Tianjin‐Hebei (BTH) metropolitan area, which has important links to food security and groundwater overdraft across North China. In this study, we revealed the prefecture city‐level virtual groundwater flows in the BTH region for, to our knowledge, the first time by compiling a nested multiregional input‐output table with 13 BTH cities and 28 Chinese provinces outside BTH in 2012. Our results showed that >50% of groundwater use in BTH cities was driven by agricultural supply for outside provinces, significantly exceeding the local demand of 38.8%. In addition, we simulated different scenarios that focused on redistributing the original agricultural production of the BTH region to other northern provinces. We found that these redistribution strategies would lead to 13%–67% groundwater savings relative to total groundwater use in the BTH region in 2012. Moreover, our results also indicated that BTH cities would save groundwater under higher stress in exchange for increased groundwater use in provinces under lower stress. These findings can be utilized to optimize the agricultural distribution and groundwater conservation policies in other regions or countries facing agriculture‐induced groundwater overdraft issues.

Energy transition is an important way to control air pollution, but it may conflict with the economic goal of alleviating regional inequality due to its inherently different cost burdens. As one of the effective measures of energy transition, this paper takes small coal-fired boiler (SCB) upgrading as an example to explore the regional mismatch between upgrading costs and health benefits. Here, we construct a boiler-level inventory of SCB upgrades for the North China Plain (NCP) during 2013-2017 and propose an integrated modeling framework to quantify the spatial contribution of economic costs and health benefits associated with SCB upgrading. We find that although the total health benefits could offset the total costs for the entire region, the developed municipalities (Beijing and Tianjin) are likely to gain more health benefits from less-developed neighboring provinces at lower costs. These developed municipalities contribute only 14% to the total health benefits but gain 21% of the benefits within their territories, 56% of which come from neighboring provinces. Their benefits are approximately 5.6 times their costs, which is much higher than the 1.5 benefit-cost ratio in neighboring provinces. Our findings may be useful in shaping more equitable and sound environmental policies in China or other regions of the world with serious coal-related air pollution.

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-intensive products) by developing a multiregional input-output model. Our model characterizes the impact of international trade between China and 140 economies and China's interprovincial trade on hazardous waste generated by 161,599 Chinese enterprises. We find that, in 2015, virtual hazardous waste flows in China's trade reached 26.6 million tons (67% of the national total), of which 31% were generated during the production of goods that were ultimately consumed abroad. Trade-related production is much dirtier than locally consumed production, generating 26% more hazardous waste per unit of GDP. Under the impact of virtual flows, 40% of the waste-intensive production and relevant disposal duty is unequally concentrated in three Chinese provinces (including two least-developed ones, Qinghai and Xinjiang). Our findings imply the importance of expanding the scope of transboundary waste regulations and provide a quantitative basis for introducing consumer responsibilities. This may help relieve waste management burdens in less-developed "waste havens".