The metabolic transition of material use and carbon emissions in economically growing Asia: Evidence from 1971 to 2016
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
The metabolic transition of material use and carbon emissions in economically growing Asia: Evidence from 1971 to 2016 Izhar Hussain Shah 1 Received: 12 February 2020 / Accepted: 27 August 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The efficient consumption of material and energy resources, with minimal carbon emissions and maximum economic output, is globally significant. This study examines the metabolic transition of resource use and CO2 emissions in nine of the largest economies of East, South, and Southeast Asia. A data envelopment model has been developed to assess the efficiency of domestic material consumption and CO2 emissions during 1971–2016 at three levels of analysis. The single-country analysis results reveal that China has made the most rapid efficiency transformation during 1971–2016 followed by Japan and South Korea, while the rest of the countries in South and Southeast Asia have not illustrated significant improvements. Results from the analysis of socio-economically grouped countries show that Japan and Bangladesh are the relatively efficient economies in East and South Asia, respectively. Among Southeast Asian countries, both Indonesia and Malaysia were found to be efficient. Based on the regional analysis comparing all nine countries, Japan has consistently remained a relatively efficient economy while China—despite rapid improvements—remains a relatively inefficient economy. To this end, Japan had the lowest material and CO2 intensities compared to all other countries. Based on our results, technological advancement, industry structure, and scale of traded goods and services were found to have a significant impact (the impact of per capita income was less pronounced) on a country’s effective resource utilization and carbon mitigation. Keywords Asia . Carbon mitigation . Developing countries . Industrial ecology . Sustainable development . Resource efficiency
Introduction Material and energy resources have increasingly become essential inputs for national economic growth, especially in developing countries (Zaim and Taskin 2000). With rising energy demands to support rapid urbanization and industrialization, unprecedented levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions have been observed in recent decades (Shah et al. 2019). In most cases, rapid economic growth has been fueled by increasing consumption of energy and strategic industrial resources such as coal, petroleum, iron, steel, cement, and paper (Schandl and West 2012; Bolanča et al. 2017). At the same time, sustainable economic development calls for efficient Responsible Editor: Eyup Dogan * Dr. Izhar Hussain Shah [email protected] 1
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Ulsan, 203-23, Daehak-ro 93, Namgu, Ulsan 44610, Republic of Korea
production and consumption of natural material and energy resources such that the resulting environmental impacts are reduced (Paramati et al. 2018; Pan et al. 2019). Similar to these lines, the concept of eco-efficiency is also
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