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Achieving air pollutant emission reduction targets with minimum abatement costs: An enterprise-level allocation method with constraints of fairness and feasibility

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Abstract

For achieving air pollutant emission reduction targets, total pollutant amount control is being continuously promoted in China. However, the traditional pattern of pollutant emission reduction allocation regardless of economic cost often results in unreasonable emission reduction pathways, and industrial enterprises as the main implementers have to pay excessively high costs. Therefore, this study adopted economic efficiency as its main consideration, used specific emission reduction measures (ERMs) of industrial enterprises as minimum allocation units, and constructed an enterpriselevel pollutant emission reduction allocation (EPERA) model with minimization of the total abatement cost (TAC) as the objective function, and fairness and feasibility as constraints for emission reduction allocation. Taking City M in China as an example, the EPERA model was used to construct a Pareto optimal frontier and obtain the optimal trade-off result. Results showed that under basic and strict emission reduction regulations, the TAC of the optimal trade-off point was reduced by 46.40% and 45.77%, respectively, in comparison with that achieved when only considering fairness, and the Gini coefficient was 0.26 and 0.31, respectively. The abatement target was attained with controllable cost and relatively fair and reasonable allocation. In addition, enterprises allocated different emission reduction quotas under different ERMs had specific characteristics that required targeted optimization of technology and equipment to enable them to achieve optimal emission reduction effects for the same abatement cost.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the Capital Blue Sky Action Cultivation Program of “Research on the Whole Process Control Technology of Pollution Sources in Industrial Parks and Research and Demonstration of Smart Environmental Protection Platforms” Project of Beijing Science and Technology Plan (Project No. Z191100009119010).

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Author notes

  1. Co-first authors and contribute equally to this work

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Environment, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Yanfei Chen, Ji Zheng, Miao Chang & Qing Chen

  2. School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing, 100083, China

    Cuicui Xiao

Authors
  1. Yanfei Chen
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  2. Ji Zheng
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  3. Miao Chang
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  4. Qing Chen
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  5. Cuicui Xiao
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Miao Chang or Qing Chen.

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Highlights

• Quantification of efficiency and fairness of abatement allocation are optimized.

• Allocation results are refined to the different abatement measures of enterprises.

• Optimized allocation results reduce abatement costs and tap the abatement space.

• Abatement suggestions are given to enterprises with different abatement quotas.

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Achieving air pollutant emission reduction targets with minimum abatement costs: An enterprise-level allocation method with constraints of fairness and feasibility

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Chen, Y., Zheng, J., Chang, M. et al. Achieving air pollutant emission reduction targets with minimum abatement costs: An enterprise-level allocation method with constraints of fairness and feasibility. Front. Environ. Sci. Eng. 16, 25 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11783-021-1459-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11783-021-1459-6

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