Zhonghua Zhang
Beijing Institute of Technology,China
Title: Embodied carbon in china’s foreign trade: A literature review based on online SCI-E and SSCI
Biography
Biography: Zhonghua Zhang
Abstract
This paper systematically presents a survey of the empirical literature on the embodied carbon in China’s foreign trade (ECCT). The latest publications regarding ECCT in peer-reviewed journals are summarized based on the bibliometric method and the online versions of Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCI-E) and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). Publications referring to ECCT are assessed with respect to quantities, most productive countries, institutions, authors, citations and disciplines. By using synthetic analysis of keyword frequency, this study reveals the most popular methodologies applied to measure the ECCT; it also discusses the variation of numerical results in the literature as well as the reasons and counter measures for the uncertainties in the results. Continuous investigation of the literature suggests that the methodology employed to measure the ECCT has become more reasonable with the results becoming more critical. However, the numerical results of the ECCT have shown great discrepancies within a given year because of different considerations on methodology specification, accounting principles and data sources and processing. For instance, the estimates of CO2 emissions embodied in the exports of China in 2007 changed from 478 Mt to over 3,000 Mt whereas those for its imports ranged from 140 Mt to over 1,700 Mt. Moreover, the results with respect to the balance of CO2 emissions embodied in the foreign trade of China in 2007 varied between over 100 Mt and 2,900 Mt. Hence, overcoming the inherent data limitations in China and improvements in calculating the ECCT should be urgently considered.