Asia-Pacific (APAC) has been the world's most dynamic emerging area of economic development and trade in recent decades. Here, we reveal the significant and imbalanced environmental and socio-economic effects of the region's growths during 1995-2015. Owing to the intra-regional trade of goods and services, APAC economies grew increasingly interdependent in each other's water and energy use, greenhouse gas (GHG) and PM2.5 emissions, and labor and economic productivity, while the environmental and economic disparity widened within the region. Furthermore, our results highlight APAC's significant role in globalization. By 2015, APAC was engaged in 50-71% of the virtual flows of water, energy, GHG, PM2.5, labor, and value added embodied in international trade. While the region's final demand and trade grew less resource- and emissions-intensive, predominantly led by China's transformations, APAC still lags behind global averages after two decades. More joint efforts of APAC economies and attention to sustainable transformation are needed.

Faculty of Engineering Technology at University of Twente Enschede 7500 AE The Netherlands

Fudan Tyndall Center and Shanghai Key Laboratory of Atmospheric Particle Pollution and Prevention Department of Environmental Science and Engineering Fudan University 200438 Shanghai China

Industrial and Systems Engineering Department Institute for a Secure and Sustainable Environment The University of Tennessee at Knoxville 525D John D Tickle Engineering Building Knoxville TN 37996 USA

Institute for Studies in County Development Shandong University 266200 Qingdao China

Institute of Eco Chongming No 3663 Northern Zhongshan Road 200062 Shanghai China

School of Economics and Management China University of Petroleum Beijing 102249 Changping Beijing China

Sustainable Process Integration Laboratory Technická 2896 2 61669 Brno Czech Republic

Universidade Paulista UNIP R Dr Bacelar 1 212 4th Floor 04026 002 Sao Paulo Brazil

Zobrazit více v PubMed

Wiedmann T, Lenzen M. Environmental and social footprints of international trade. Nat. Geosci. 2018;11:314–321.

Acquaye A, et al. Measuring the environmental sustainability performance of global supply chains: a multi-regional input-output analysis for carbon, sulphur oxide and water footprints. J. Environ. Mange. 2017;187:571–585. PubMed

Alsamawi A, Murray J, Lenzen M. The employment footprints of nations: uncovering master‐servant relationships. J. Ind. Ecol. 2014;18:59–70.

Simas M, Wood R, Hertwich E. Labor embodied in trade: the role of labor and energy productivity and implications for greenhouse gas emissions. J. Ind. Ecol. 2015;19:343–356.

Asian Development Banks. Key indicators for the Asia-Pacific Region in 2019. https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/521981/ki2019.pdf. (2019).

Ascensão F, et al. Environmental challenges for the Belt and Road Initiative. Nat. Sustain. 2018;1:206.

RCEP negotiations, regional connectivity plans in focus as ASEAN leaders, dialogue partners to meet in Bangkok. http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-11/01/c_138519997.htm. (2019).

Negotiation of regional comprehensive economic partnership agreement. http://www.gov.cn/xinwen/2019-11/02/content_5447847.htm. (2019)

WWAP (United Nations World Water Assessment Programme). The United Nations World Water Development Report 2015: Water for a Sustainable World (UNESCO, Paris, 2015).

Asian Development Bank (ADB), Water Development Outlook. https://www.adb.org/documents/series/adb-annual-reports. (2013).

Rasul G. Managing the food, water, and energy nexus for achieving the sustainable development goals in South Asia. Environ. Dev. 2016;18:14–25.

Schandl H, West J. Resource use and resource efficiency in the Asia–Pacific region. Glob. Environ. Change. 2010;20:636–647.

Wang H, et al. Trade-driven relocation of air pollution and health impacts in China. Nat. Commun. 2017;8:1–7. PubMed PMC

Asia-Pacific Disaster Report 2019. http://www.chinanews.com/gj/2019/08-22/8935078.shtml (2019).

Wong M. Globalization, spending and income inequality in Asia Pacific. J. Comp. Asian Dev. 2016;15:1–18.

Kanbur, R., Rhee, C. & Zhuang, J. Inequality in Asia and the Pacific: Trends, drivers, and policy implications (Routledge, 2014).

Sustainable Social Development in Asia and the Pacific: Towards a People-Centred Transformation. https://www.unescap.org/. (2017).

Soligno I, Malik A, Lenzen M. Socioeconomic drivers of global blue water use. Water Resour. Res. 2019;55:5650–5664.

Xu Y, Dietzenbacher E. A structural decomposition analysis of the emissions embodied in trade. Ecol. Econ. 2014;101:10–20.

Lenzen M, et al. The carbon footprint of global tourism. Nat. Commun. 2018;8:522.

Nansai K, et al. Affluent countries inflict inequitable mortality and economic loss on Asia via PM2. 5 emissions. Environ. Int. 2020;134:105238. PubMed

de Ruiter H, et al. Total global agricultural land footprint associated with UK food supply 1986–2011. Glob. Environ. Change. 2017;43:72–81.

Simas M, Golsteijn L, Huijbregts M, Wood R, Hertwich E. The “bad labor” footprint: quantifying the social impacts of globalization. Sustainability. 2014;6:7514–7540.

Wiedmann TO, et al. The material footprint of nations. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA. 2015;112:6271–6276. PubMed PMC

Zheng X, et al. Drivers of change in China’s energy-related CO2 emissions. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA. 2020;117:29–36. PubMed PMC

Steen-Olsen K, Weinzettel J, Cranston G, Ercin AE, Hertwich EG. Carbon, land, and water footprint accounts for the European Union: consumption, production, and displacements through international trade. Environ. Sci. Technol. 2012;46:10883–10891. PubMed

Tukker A, et al. Environmental and resource footprints in a global context: Europe’s structural deficit in resource endowments. Glob. Environ. Change. 2016;40:171–181.

Hertwich EG, Peters GP. Carbon footprint of nations: a global, trade-linked analysis. Environ. Sci. Technol. 2009;43:6414–6420. PubMed

Weinzettel J, Hertwich EG, Peters GP, Steen-Olsen K, Galli A. Affluence drives the global displacement of land use. Glob. Environ. Change. 2013;23:433–438.

Plank B, Eisenmenger N, Schaffartzik A, Wiedenhofer D. International trade drives global resource use: a structural decomposition analysis of raw material consumption from 1990–2010. Environ. Sci. Technol. 2018;52:4190–4198. PubMed

Onat NC, Kucukvar M, Tatari O. Conventional, hybrid, plug-in hybrid or electric vehicles? State-based comparative carbon and energy footprint analysis in the United States. Appl. Energy. 2015;150:36–49.

Luo F, Becken S, Zhong Y. Changing travel patterns in China and ‘carbon footprint’implications for a domestic tourist destination. Tour. Manage. 2018;65:1–13.

Arto I, Dietzenbacher E. Drivers of the growth in global greenhouse gas emissions. Environ. Sci. Technol. 2014;48:5388–5394. PubMed

Lenzen M, et al. International trade of scarce water. Ecol. Econ. 2013;94:78–85.

Malik A, Lan J. The role of outsourcing in driving global carbon emissions. Econ. Syst. Res. 2016;28:168–182.

Hoekstra R, Michel B, Suh S. The emission cost of international sourcing: using structural decomposition analysis to calculate the contribution of international sourcing to CO2-emission growth. Econ. Syst. Res. 2016;28:151–167.

Zhang Q, et al. Transboundary health impacts of transported global air pollution and international trade. Nature. 2017;543:705–709. PubMed

Liu X, Klemeš JJ, Varbanov PS, Čuček L, Qian Y. Virtual carbon and water flows embodied in international trade: a review on consumption-based analysis. J. Clean. Prod. 2017;146:20–28.

Merciai S, Schmidt J. Methodology for the construction of global multi‐regional hybrid supply and use tables for the EXIOBASE v3 database. J. Ind. Ecol. 2018;22:516–531.

The World Bank. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?end=2018&start=2018&view=bar. (2015).

UN. ESCAP. Asia and the Pacific SDG Progress Report 2019. https://www.unescap.org/sites/default/files/publications/ESCAP_Asia_and_the_Pacific_SDG_Progress_Report_2019.pdf. (2019).

Mekonnen MM, Hoekstra AY. Four billion people facing severe water scarcity. Sci. Adv. 2016;2:e1500323. PubMed PMC

Zhao H, et al. Inequality of household consumption and air pollution-related deaths in China. Nat. Commun. 2019;10:1–9. PubMed PMC

Rohra H, Taneja A. Indoor air quality scenario in India—an outline of household fuel combustion. Atmos. Environ. 2016;129:243–255.

Shi Y, Matsunaga T, Yamaguchi Y. High-resolution mapping of biomass burning emissions in three tropical regions. Environ. Sci. Technol. 2015;49:10806–10814. PubMed

Manju S, Sagar N. Renewable energy integrated desalination: a sustainable solution to overcome future fresh-water scarcity in India. Renew. Sust. Energy. Rev. 2017;73:594–609.

Bhattacharya S, Jana C. Renewable energy in India: historical developments and prospects. Energy. 2009;34:981–991.

Ghude SD, et al. Premature mortality in India due to PM2.5 and ozone exposure. Geophys. Res. Lett. 2016;43:4650–4658.

Mall R, Gupta A, Singh R, Singh R, Rathore L. Water resources and climate change: an Indian perspective. Curr. Sci. 2006;90:1610–1626.

OECD. African Economic Outlook 2014: Global Value Chains and Africa’s Industrialisation (OECD Development Centre, 2014).

Review, N. A. Shift to service sector sends global ripples, weakens imports. http://asia.nikkei.com/Politics-Economy/Economy/Shift-to-service-sector-sends-global-ripples-weakens-imports. (2015).

Meng J, et al. The rise of South–South trade and its effect on global CO2 emissions. Nat. Commun. 2018;9:1–7. PubMed PMC

Zheng H, et al. Mapping carbon and water networks in the north China urban agglomeration. One Earth. 2019;1:126–137.

Wang Q, Hubacek K, Feng K, Wei Y-M, Liang Q-M. Distributional effects of carbon taxation. Appl. Energy. 2016;184:1123–1131.

Zhang K, Wang Q, Liang Q-M, Chen H. A bibliometric analysis of research on carbon tax from 1989 to 2014. Renew. Sust. Energy Rev. 2016;58:297–310.

Carl J, Fedor D. Tracking global carbon revenues: a survey of carbon taxes versus cap-and-trade in the real world. Energy Policy. 2016;96:50–77.

Semenza JC, et al. Public perception of climate change: voluntary mitigation and barriers to behavior change. Am. J. Prev. Med. 2008;35:479–487. PubMed

Marotzke J, Semmann D, Milinski M. The economic interaction between climate change mitigation, climate migration and poverty. Nat. Clim. Change. 2020;10:518–525.

Berrang-Ford L, et al. Tracking global climate change adaptation among governments. Nat. Clim. Change. 2019;9:440–449.

Tian X, Hu Y, Yin H, Geng Y, Bleischwitz R. Trade impacts of China’s Belt and Road Initiative: from resource and environmental perspectives. Resour. Conserv. Recycl. 2019;150:104430.

ESCAP. Trade, Investment & Innovations. The Asia-Pacifc Trade Agreement. https://www.unescap.org/apta. (2018).

Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (United Nations, 2015).

Xiao Z, Yao M, Tang X, Sun L. Identifying critical supply chains: an input-output analysis for Food-Energy-Water Nexus in China. Ecol. Modell. 2019;392:31–37.

Romero-Lankao P, McPhearson T, Davidson DJ. The food-energy-water nexus and urban complexity. Nat. Clim. Change. 2017;7:233–235.

Nair S, George B, Malano HM, Arora M, Nawarathna B. Water–energy–greenhouse gas nexus of urban water systems: Review of concepts, state-of-art and methods. Resour. Conserv. Recycl. 2014;89:1–10.

Stadler K, et al. EXIOBASE 3: developing a time series of detailed environmentally extended multi‐regional input‐output tables. J. Ind. Ecol. 2018;22:502–515.

Miller, R. E. & Blair, P. D. Input-output analysis: foundations and extensions (Cambridge university press, 2009).

Galli A, et al. Integrating ecological, carbon and water footprint into a “footprint family” of indicators: definition and role in tracking human pressure on the planet. Ecol. Indic. 2012;16:100–112.

Myhre, G. et al. Anthropogenic and Natural Radiative Forcing, Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 659–740. (2013).

COVID-19 pandemic facilitating energy transition opportunities

Process assessment, integration and optimisation: The path towards cleaner production