Identifying the environmental support and constraints to the Chinese economic growth—An application of the Emergy Accounting method

The economy of China keeps increasing at high rate, although a bit slower recently than in the past due to the international economic turmoil. The Chinese economic performance affects the world economy in many ways (from increased primary resource and commodity imports to a more active financial role of China worldwide). Not unexpectedly, several and diverse environmental problems are coupled with economic growth, linked to resource availability, competition for energy resources and the overall carrying capacity of the environment as a source and a sink. Monodimensional assessments of either economic growth or environmental aspects are unlikely to provide the needed understanding of development opportunities and potential environmental loading. We suggest in this paper an assessment of the evolution of Chinese Economy based on the Emergy Accounting method, developed by H.T. Odum in the Eighties and further refined more recently. The emergy approach is being increasingly applied worldwide, and in China as well, to study individual production processes, sectors and whole economies and provides a comprehensive picture of the interaction of economic growth and the environment, much useful for economic and environmental policy making. A set of emergy-based performance indicators was calculated with reference to the year 2009 and compared with previous studies from literature, by means of a standardization procedure to ensure consistency. The 2009 national Emergy/GDP ratio, an indicator of the emergy investment per unit of economic product generated, has been calculated respectively as 8.61E+11 solar equivalent joules/Yuan RMB (equivalent to 5.88E+12sej/US$), showing a decreasing trend from 1975 up-to-date, similar to other countries over their development path. The Emergy Sustainability Index (ESI), an aggregate measure of economic performance and environmental load, also shows a decreasing trend signaling that the Chinese economic development is strictly coupled to non-negligible environmental stress and lower sustainability.