33% of China's Carbon Footprint Blamed on Exports

July 29, 2008 — -- Finger-pointing, and "China bashing" in particular, is a favourite game when it comes to assigning responsibility for climate change.

But things are not always as straightforward as they seem. Developed countries import many of the products that contribute to China's greenhouse gas emissions.

Economists now say that one-third of China's carbon dioxide emissions are pumped into the atmosphere in order to manufacture exported goods – many of them "advanced" electronics goods destined for developed countries.

"Export goods emissions" account for 1.7 billion tonnes of China's carbon dioxide. That represents 6% of total global emissions – the equivalent of Germany, France and the UK's combined emissions.

Discussing the scale of China's emissions has been a hot topic since it was forecast that they could surpass US emissions as the world's leader in 2007. Some say that has now happened.

A large share of these emissions – up to 25% – has been blamed on China's ever-growing export market, but this has not been quantified until now.

Now Christopher Weber of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and colleagues have shown that the figure is larger still.

Weber's team used a standard model of the Chinese economy, produced by the Chinese government. This model, which operates on the same principle as others produced by every national government, reflects how money has flowed in and out of different sectors of the economy since the 1980s.

They combined this with nationally-produced emissions data, which shows how much emissions are produced by which sectors.

Matching the model to the dataset allowed the team to calculate that, in 2005, export sectors generated 1.7 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide – 33% of China's emissions. Data is not yet available for more recent years.

Weber says that, in 1987, exports accounted for just 230 million tonnes, 12% of China's total emissions.

Interestingly, even as Chinese export emissions have risen, so have the emissions the nation avoids by importing primary products such as minerals and basic metals. This switch reflects China's switch from a primary to a secondary producer. Increasingly, the products it is exporting are "advanced" products.