ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Environ. Sci.
Sec. Environmental Economics and Management
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2025.1602397
This article is part of the Research TopicCreating an Economy that is not Reliant on Coal, Oil, and GasView all articles
From Pollution to Progress: A Decomposition Analysis of Decoupling Performance for Industrial pollution in China
Provisionally accepted
- 1SINOPEC Petroleum Exploration and Production Research Institute, Beijing, China
- 2Beijing Technology and Business University, Beijing, Beijing Municipality, China
- 3Hebei University of Technology, Beichen District, Tianjin Municipality, China
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China's industrial sector drives economic growth but exacerbates energy-environment conflicts, posing challenges to sustainable development. Despite China's nationwide emission reduction efforts, the persistence of subnational disparities in mitigation performance and the determinants underlying these variations remain understudied. Employing the Tapio decoupling method, this study quantifies the spatiotemporal decoupling of three key industrial pollutants (sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and smoke/dust) from industrial economic growth, followed by the Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index (LMDI) decomposition method to identify their driving factors. Based on panel data from 2000 to 2020 across 30 Chinese provinces, the results reveal that strong decoupling prevailed during the study period, temporally aligned with national energy and emission policy adjustments. Furthermore, provincial-level analysis reveals that economically less developed regions lag in decoupling performance. Finally, decomposition analysis demonstrates that population growth and economic expansion hinder decoupling, while reductions in industrial emission coefficients, energy intensity, and cleaner energy structures promote it. These findings, constrained by production-based emissions data, highlight that early industrial upgrading, not just post-growth regulation, is critical for synergistic economy-environment development.
Keywords: industrial pollution, Industrial economy, Decoupling analysis, Decomposition analysis, China
Received: 29 Mar 2025; Accepted: 12 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zheng, Zhang, Qian, Chen, Zhao and Wang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Yuan Qian, SINOPEC Petroleum Exploration and Production Research Institute, Beijing, China
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