In urban areas around the world, increasing motorization and growing travel demand make the urban transportation sector an ever-greater contributor to local air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. The situation is particularly acute in developing countries, where growing metropolitan regions suffer some of the world's highest levels of air pollution.

A growing interest has recently been placed on the potential of nature-based solutions to help mitigate climate change, reflecting the importance of natural ecosystems as sources and sinks for greenhouse gases. Forests are of the hot debate – that sequester and also emit carbon dioxide (CO2). In this paper, we estimate the forest carbon sequestration potential for China.

The significant environmental improvement in China has drawn much research attention in recent years. However, in exploring the factors that lead to pollution reduction, most literature has ignored the slowing economic growth under the ‘New Normal’ of China. This omission could lead to the overestimation of the pollution reduction effects of other factors. In this paper, we estimate the effect of the economic slowdown using a dynamic Computable General Equilibrium model, CHINAGEM. We find that the contribution of the economic slowdown to pollution reduction ranges from 10% to 30%.

In this paper we try to assess the quality of growth for provinces in China over the period of 1997–2015. To do so we calculate a set of Green total factor productivity (or GTFP) indexes by incorporating environmental performance variables at the provincial level. A nonparametric approach (Directional Distance Function a la Chung et al., 1997) is adopted in the estimation. Furthermore, we apply bootstrapping method to correct estimation bias and obtain statistical property of the estimated indexes.

This paper investigates the effects of prenatal exposure to extreme temperatures on birth outcomes—specifically, the log of birth weight and an indicator for low birth weight—using a nationally representative dataset on rural China. During the time period we examine (1991–2000), indoor air conditioning was not widely available and migration was limited, allowing us to address identification issues endemic in the climate change literature related to adaptation and location sorting. We find substantial heterogeneity in the effects of extreme temperature exposure on birth outcomes.

Ownership and usage of air conditioners (AC) have increased dramatically in the past few decades as global warming and the increasing occurrence of extreme hot weather have become major concerns. However, there is a lack of household-level studies on the effect of climate change on AC energy consumption and usage patterns, especially for developing countries, which have great potential for AC adoption and usage.

There is an ongoing reform in coal taxation in China, from a quantity-based to a price-based approach. While the coal tax could play an important role in resource conservation and air pollution reduction, its distributional effect is not well studied. This paper investigates the distributional effect of China's coal taxes on households before and after the reform. We find that about 30 percent of rural households and six percent of urban households are directly affected by the coal taxes, and that the directly affected households tend to be poor.

This study provides evidence that trade expansion has contributed to the degradation of air pollution in China. On the basis of different responses of counties’ trade to China's World Trade Organization accession at the end of 2001, we exploit air pollution data from NASA to construct a difference‐in‐differences predicted trade as an instrument for our identification. We document statistically significant and robust evidence on trade expansion, which accounts for approximately 60% and 20% for the increase of PM2.5 and SO2, respectively, in China.