Effects of pollution control measures on carbon emission reduction in China: evidence from the 11th and 12th Five-Year Plans

SO2 emissions have been declining in China recently. The emission reduction has mainly been achieved engineering reduction, structural reduction, and administrative reduction. In this paper, three key industries (electricity generation, steel, and cement) are selected to measure the effects of SO2 emission reductions, the synergy effects of energy saving, and CO2 emission reduction. The main results show that, during the period of the ‘11th Five-Year Plan’, engineering reduction of coal-fired power plant desulfurization played the most crucial role in the emission reduction; both engineering reduction and structural reduction can achieve low-pollution emission, but the contributions are not the same due to the divergence of relevant industries. Generally speaking, structural reduction can relatively easily achieve the synergy effect of the main pollutants and GHGs; in comparison, however, engineering reduction does not easily achieve the synergy effect. During the ‘13th Five-Year Plan’ period, the following plans are proposed: strengthening the front pollution control, increasing the engineering reduction, narrowing the difference between the pollution reduction engineering ability and the actual pollution reduction effect, and strengthening the supervisory and administrative effect of both the approval of the front end and the running of the middle end.POLICY RELEVANCEChina is on the way to realize industrialization and urbanization. The climate-friendly environmental protection strategy is particularly important for rapidly developing countries such as China, because it can address air pollution and climate change issues at the same time in a more economically efficient manner. This paper selects three key industries to evaluate current pollutant control policy synergy effect from the ‘11th Five-Year Plan’ to the ‘12th Five-Year Plan’ period in order to give more sense to policy makers during 13th Five-Year Plan. The estimate of this study shows that the control of pollutants can generally have synergic control effects on GHG emissions and give detailed measures for 13th Five-Year Plan.