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China’s agricultural GHG emission efficiency: regional disparity and spatial dynamic evolution

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Abstract

Improving China’s agricultural greenhouse gases (GHG) emission efficiency has become an important way to cope with climate change in an ecologically—and ethically responsible manner. In this paper, we use a global slacks-based inefficiency model to evaluate the agricultural greenhouse gases (GHG) emission efficiency levels in China during 2000–2015. The regional disparity of China’s GHG emission efficiency is examined by using a Dagum Gini coefficient. A spatial Markov chain technique is also employed to investigate the spatial dynamic evolution of agricultural GHG emission efficiency. The results show that: (1) China’s agricultural GHG emission efficiency increased steadily during the study period; a certain gap in efficiency among provinces and regions also exists. (2) Between-group disparity is the main source of the overall regional disparities in China’s agricultural GHG emission efficiency. The disparities between regions are on the rise, while the disparities within regions are relatively stable. (3) China’s agricultural GHG emission efficiency demonstrates significant spatial dependence. This study provides policy implications for the sustainable development of China’s agricultural sector.

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source and contribution rate of regional disparity of AGEE

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Notes

  1. According to the "Opinions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council on Promoting the Rise of the Central Region" and the "Implementation Opinions of the State Council on Several Policy Measures for the Development of the Western Region", see https://www.stats.gov.cn/ztjc/zthd/sjtjr/dejtjkfr/tjkp/201106/t20110613_71947.htm

  2. Due to the unavailability of Tibet’s historical energy consumption data, Tibet’s data are not included in this article.

  3. According to IPCC 2007, each ton of CO2 contains 0.2727 tons of carbon. The greenhouse effects caused by the emission of 1 ton of CH4 and 1 ton of N2O are equivalent to the emission of 25 tons of CO2 (about 6.8182 tons of carbon) and 298 tons of CO2 (about 81.2727 tons of carbon), respectively

  4. This is the sum of the first row of non-diagonal elements in Table 5.

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Acknowledgements

The study is partly supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (71871146, 71602038) and the Ministry of Education of Humanities and Social Science project of China (Nos. 18YJA630090).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Management, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, 518060, China

    Quande Qin, Huimin Yan & Jie Liu

  2. Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, China

    Quande Qin

  3. School of Management, Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou, 510520, China

    Xiude Chen

  4. School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China

    Bin Ye

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  1. Quande Qin
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Correspondence to Xiude Chen.

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Qin, Q., Yan, H., Liu, J. et al. China’s agricultural GHG emission efficiency: regional disparity and spatial dynamic evolution. Environ Geochem Health 44, 2863–2879 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10653-020-00744-7

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