Research Team Leaders:  Hongmin Chen, Guodong Sun

　　　
The distinction between a country’s consumption-based emissions and production-based or territorial emissions is becoming more and more evident because of international trade. The production-based emissions accounting principle under Kyoto protocol would easily result in ‘carbon leakage’ around world and lead to false emissions reduction solutions for a country. This project focuses on the carbon emission embodied in international trade and its responsibility attribution methods, which will have a great impact on global carbon emissions mitigation cooperation.

　　　
This project intends to compare different responsibility allocation principles for trade-embodied emissions mitigation and to find implementation approaches for the consumption-based principle, which aims to provide an alternative for global emissions mitigation cooperation based on consumer responsibility as well as to offer suggestions for China in post-Kyoto climate negotiations.

　　　This project includes four working packages. 

　　　WP1  Assess the CO2 emissions embodied in trade and its  impact on global emissions mitigation cooperation.

　　　WP2  Compare different responsibility allocation approaches of trade-embodied emissions.

　　　WP3  Explore implied policies or requirements to conduct different emissions allocation approaches.

　　　WP4  Evaluate the impacts of different emissions allocation approaches for China in climate negotiations.

　　　
This project is an interdisciplinary study, which engages researchers from different disciplines including environment science, economics and political science. 

　　　
Major research methods of this project include input-output analysis to account the trade-embodied emissions, scenario analysis to evaluate the impact of different responsibility allocation approaches on different countries, comparative study on different responsibility allocation approaches and interviews with stakeholders to find  implied policies or requirements to conduct different emissions allocation approaches

　　　
Main expected outputs include reports, policy briefs and academic papers.