Theimpact of lifestyle on energy use and CO2 emission An empirical_analysis_of_China's_residents

Energy Policy 35 (2007) ne s iua emy nd 22 A) CO approximately 26 per cent of total energy consumption and 30 per cent of CO2 emission every year are a consequence of residents’ late 1980s, energy researchers began to pay attention to the impact of consumers’ behavior with regard to energy use, locations y besides energy prices and incomes’’. Rees (1995), Daly (1996) and Duchin (1998) argued that ‘‘most Lenzen (1998) analyzed the impact of consumers’ activities on energy consumption and greenhouse gases emissions in data of expenditure. Bin and Dowlatabadi (2005) studied the relationship between consumer activities and energy use and the related CO2 emission using the Consumer Lifestyle ARTICLE IN PRESS Approach (CLA). China is a typical binary economy and socially diverse country; there is a significant difference in many aspects 0301-4215/$ - see front matter r 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.enpol.2005.11.020 �Corresponding author. Tel.: +8610 62650861; fax: +86 10 62542619. E-mail addresses: ymwei@deas.harvard.edu, ymwei@263.net (Y.-M. Wei). and introduced the concept of lifestyle into the study of personal energy consumption. They were trying to determine the impact of personal lifestyle on the total energy consumption and environmental change. Schipper et al. (1989) concluded that ‘‘about 45–55% of total energy use is influenced by consumers’ activities for personal transportation, personal services, and homes’’, they thought that ‘‘significant changes in energy demand will be driven by the mix of personal activities and their Australia using the input–output model. Weber and Perrels (2000) made a quantitative analysis of the impact of some lifestyle factors on the 1990s and 2010s energy demand, and the related emission in West Germany, France and Netherlands. Pachauri and Spreng (2002) analyzed the direct and indirect energy demand of Indian households using input–output tables. Reinders et al. (2003) evaluated the average energy requirement of households in 11 European Union member countries, based on household times greater than the direct impact. Residence; home energy use; food; and education, cultural and recreation services are the most energy-intensive and carbon-emission-intensive activities. For rural residents, the direct impact on energy consumption is 1.86 times that of the indirect, and home energy use; food; education, and cultural recreation services; and personal travel are the most energy-intensive and carbon-emission-intensive activities. This paper provides quantitative evidence for energy conservation and environmental protection focused policies. China’s security for energy supply is singled out as a serious issue for government policy-makers, and we suggest that government should harmonize the relationships between stakeholders to determine rational strategies. r 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Lifestyle; Energy consumption; CO2 emissions 1. Introduction Energy use and the related CO2 emission are influenced by technology efficiency and by personal lifestyles. In the environmental degradation can be traced to the behavior of consumers either directly, through activities like the disposal of garbage or the use of cars, or indirectly through the production activities undertaken to satisfy them’’. lifestyles, and the economic activities to support these demands. For urban residents the indirect impact on energy consumption is 2.44 The impact of lifestyle on e An empirical analysi Yi-Ming Weia,�, Lan-Cui L aInstitute of Policy and Management, Chinese Acad bSchool of Business, University of Science a Available online Abstract Based on the application of a Consumer Lifestyle Approach (CL urban and rural residents on China’s energy use and the related 247–257 rgy use and CO2 emission: of China’s residents ,b, Ying Fana, Gang Wua,b of Science, P.O. Box 8712, Beijing 100080, China Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China December 2005 , this paper quantifies the direct and indirect impact of lifestyle of 2 emissions during the period 1999–2002. The results show that www.elsevier.com/locate/enpol between urban and rural regions that have existed since 1949. Therefore, it is critical to analyze the impact on energy use and the related emissions for lifestyles of urban residents and rural residents, respectively. Presently, it is widely recognized that China is a ‘‘transition economy’’, whose transition will bring deep change for its people, employment patterns, living standards, consumer behavior and similar sociological indicators. Whilst socio-economic development will be taking place, it is likely that resource issues and environmental problems will manifest them- consumption increases. Therefore, the change of urban and rural living consumption structure could have a significant impact on the future energy use and related CO2 emission. It is clearly evident that a study of the impact of residents’ lifestyle on energy use and related CO2 emission in China is extremely important. Based on a CLA used by Bin and Dowlatabadi (2005), this paper analyzes the following questions: (1) How do we study the impact of lifestyle changes of China’s residents on the energy consumption and the related CO2 emission? (2) What are ARTICLE IN PRESS izat ianc l tr litie rans ral diti Y.-M. Wei et al. / Energy Policy 35 (2007) 247–257248 selves. Firstly, there will be a series of changes due to urbanization. There is a great difference in energy consumption between rural and urban population. Rapid urbanization will bring more and more rural residents to become urban residents; which will change their energy consuming behavior and increase the requirement for electricity, oil and natural gas. Secondly, the difference of lifestyle between rural and urban residents is becoming gradually smaller. In rural regions, more and more commercial energy, such as coal, oil, electricity, and natural gas, are used, and which is gradually substituting the use of non-commercial energy, such as straw and firewood. Meantime, the increased income of rural residents will lead to greater commodities’ demand, and increases in their living expenditures for durable goods, such as refrigerators, computers, motorcycles and similar fast-moving-consumer goods (FMCG). All of these will lead to greater requirement for electricity. On the other hand, more and more rural residents will purchase and use efficient machines driven by electricity and oil for agricultural production. So the total development and modernization of rural regions will improve the living standards of rural residents, and will also lead to a high energy requirement. Thirdly, the living consumption structure of urban residents will increasingly change. The first evidence in improvement of living consumption structure has focused on the home appliances during the period 1980–1995, and interestingly, refrigerators, color TV and washing machines were the most fashionable goods. After 1995, the living consumption structure was changed again, and the consumption of housing, cars, communication and electronic products, culture and education, and holiday and travel became new ‘‘hot’’ Table 1 Residents living behaviors categorization Residents living behavior categorization Urban Residents’ living behavior categor Direct influences Home energy use including lighting, appl space heating and water heating; persona Indirect influences Food; clothing; residence; household faci services; medicine and medical services; t communication services; education, cultu recreation services; miscellaneous commo services the respective role of rural and urban residents’ lifestyle choice in the total energy consumption and the related CO2 emission? (3) What are the most energy/CO2-intensive consumer behaviors? 2. Relationship between lifestyle, energy use and related CO2 emission Bin and Dowlatabadi (2005) illustrated the relationships among different lifestyles on energy consumption and the related CO2 emission. They argue that consumers may use energy directly whilst, on the other hand, there is a consumer need to buy and use a range of products in order to meet their basic need for commodities, such as clothing, food, housing and traveling. The production and proces- sing of these commodities would obviously lead to extensive energy consumption. Therefore, the impact of consumers’ lifestyle on the energy consumption and the related CO2 emission can be divided into direct impact and indirect impact. Direct impact refers to home energy use and personal travel: home energy use refers to direct living energy use including lighting, appliances, cooking, space heating and water heating. Indirect impact refers to the energy consumption and CO2 emission occurred in the preparation of a product or service before its use. Details of categorization for residents’ living behaviors are depicted in Table 1. Because China is a transition economy, this paper discusses the direct and indirect impact of urban and rural residents’ lifestyle on the energy use and CO2 emission. However, when discussing the impact of rural residents’ lifestyle on energy use and CO2 emission, we do not consider the impact of the residence. The rationale for this decision lays in the fact that the end-use energy shown in Construction in China Energy Statistical Yearbook did ion Rural Residents’ living behavior categorization es, cooking, avel Home energy use including lighting, appliances, cooking, space heating and water heating; personal travel s, and port and and es and Food; clothing; household facilities, and services; medicine and medical services; transport and communication services; education, cultural and recreation services; miscellaneous commodities and services household consumption. The lifestyle is a way of living infl Lif fram T foll (1) (2) (3) Household characteristics, such as household size, ARTICLE IN PRESS y P income and location, and housing area, which form household context for a consumer’s decision-making. (4) Consumer choice, such as purchases and use of service and equipment. (5) Consequence, such as energy use and the related environmental changes, which are the results of consumer behavior. The role of the external environment in the lifestyle is the most significant, and it directly influences the other four aspects. Lifestyle in different countries, and even different regions in a country, is different due to the alternative external environment. It was therefore deemed appropriate to adopt the CLA to analyze the impact of lifestyle of urban and rural residents on the energy use and the related CO2 emission in China. 3.2. Methodology 3.2.1. Home energy use Home energy including lighting, appliances, cooking, space heating and water heating, that is direct living ene Yea consumer’s decision process. Individual determinants, such as attitudes, personal preference and consumption motives, which are perso- nal psychological variables influencing a consumer’s decision-making. External environment variables, such as cultural back- ground, social consumption attitude and technology development, which form external context to a he CLA (Bin and Dowlatabadi, 2005) contains the owing factors: lifes ework which connects influence factors that affect tyle, with related consequences. con uences and is reflected by one’s consumption behavior. estyle is influenced by many factors, and also leads to sequence. So the CLA provides us with an explicit not contain energy use of rural construction. However, there is almost no heating and gas supply in China’s rural regions. Moreover, there is also a significant difference in water supply between urban and rural regions. Up to 2002, only 19.63 per cent of the total villages in China could benefit from tap water (JiangSu Construction, 2004). 3. Methodology and data 3.1. Consumer lifestyle approach (CLA) Drawing upon the work of Bin and Dowlatabadi (2005), the term consumers refers to the entity that purchases and uses products and services for the purpose of individual or Y.-M. Wei et al. / Energ rgy use, can be taken from China Energy Statistical rbook. The calculation of the related CO2 emissions of home energy is presented below: End_use_CO2 ¼ P mðFuelm� CO2CoefficientmÞ, where Fuelm refers to the fuel m, m kinds of fuels, respectively, refer to coal, petroleum, natural gas, electricity and heat. CO2Coefficientm is the carbon coeffi- cient of fuel m, and carbon coefficients of coal, oil and natural gas are from Energy Research Institute in 1991 (Zhang, 2000). The carbon coefficients of electricity and heat are based on our calculation. 3.2.2. Personal travel The vehicles for personal travel include cars, motor- cycles, buses, planes and trains. In view of the lack of availability of data, this paper only considers the energy use of domestic cars and motorcycles. The energy use and the related environmental impacts are relatively smaller when residents choose public transport. Moreover, the acquisition of these data is difficult. But domestic cars and motorcycles are convenient for travel, and the impact of using them on energy consumption and the environmental changes are greater. The number of domestic cars and motorcycles is taken from China Statistical Yearbook (2000, 2001, 2002, 2003), and the number of kilometers of travel per year for motorcycles and their respective gasoline consumption per 100 km is taken from the China Fuel Efficiency Background report of the Development Re- search Center of the state council (DRC) of the People’s Republic of China et al. (2003). The average travel (kilometer) of domestic cars per year is taken from the results of Yao and Jiang (2003). The formula used to calculate the energy consumption of personal travel is presented below: PT_energyr ¼ Nr_motorcycles Nr_families 100 � � Gmotorcycles Nmotorcycles 100 � � þNr_cars Nr_families 100 � � Gcars Ncars 100 � � , PT_energyu ¼ Nu_motorcycles Nu_families 100 � � Gmotorcycles Nmotorcycles 100 � � þNu_cars Nu_families 100 � � Gcars Ncars 100 � � , where PT_energyr refers to the energy use of rural residents’ personal travel, PT_energyu refers to the energy use of urban residents’ personal travel. Nr_motorcycles refers to the number of motorcycles in the rural families, Nu_motorcycles refers to the number of motorcycles in the urban families. Nr_families refers to the number of families in rural regions, Nu_families refers to the number of families in urban regions. Nmotorcycles refers to the number of kilometer traveling per year for motorcycles, Ncars refers to the number of kilometer traveling per year for home cars. olicy 35 (2007) 247–257 249 Gmotorcycles refers to gasoline consumption per 100 km for motorcycles, Gcars refers to gasoline consumption per 100 km for home cars. Nr_cars refers to the number of home cars in the rural families, Nu_cars refers to the number of home cars in the urban families. 3.2.3. Indirect energy use Indirect energy use in this paper refers to the energy use occurred in the production process of those products and services to meet residents’ clothing, eating, residing and traveling needs. In this paper, we use an average annual resident’s consuming expenditure to calculate indirect energy use by urban and rural residents’ behaviors. These consumer expenditures include residents’ expenditures on: food; clothing; residence; household facilities, and services; medicines and health care; transport and communication; education, cultural and recreational services; miscellaneous commodities and services. The full list of consumer behavior to cause indirect energy use and CO2 emission is presented in Table 2. As China has no Environmental Input–output Life Cycle Analysis (EIO-LCA) model, we cannot calculate the energy use and CO2 emission of every consuming behavior as listed in Table 2. In terms of China Energy Statistical Yearbook (2000–2002), energy use by sectors does not match to the commodities in Table 2. For example, the sectors related to food in the China Energy Statistical Yearbook (2000–2002) are food processing, food produc- tion, and beverage production. Therefore, we can only estimate the indirect energy use and CO2 emission of residents’ behavior in terms of their respective total expenditures on food, clothing, residence, household facilities, and services, medicine and medical services, transport and communication services, education, cultural and recreation services, and miscellaneous commodities and services. Table 3 shows those sectors in China Energy Statistical Yearbook related consumer expenditure in Table 2. With respect to Table 3, we can calculate the energy intensity and CO2 emission of the sectors for each of these consumer expenditures. The calculated energy intensity and carbon intensity in 2002 is presented in Table 4. The indirect energy use calculated in this paper does not contain the energy use incurred through the preparation of imported products and services because we assume that the energy intensity and carbon intensity of imported products and service are the same as those of domestic products and services. So the results calculated in this paper may be different from the actual energy consumption due to imports. But compared with the number of imported products and services purchased or used by China’s residents, the domestic products and services are the main ARTICLE IN PRESS Table 2 Consumer behaviors to cause indirect energy use and CO2 emission s an ; ca thin me ria co cre r, e co ditu cto ng, ry g ssin eq ha te and sp d su d s Y.-M. Wei et al. / Energy Policy 35 (2007) 247–257250 Food Grain; starche products; eggs service fees. Clothing Garments; clo Household facilities, articles and services Durable consu furniture mate Medicine and medical services Transport and communication services Transport and Education, cultural and recreation services Recreation; re Residence Housing; wate Miscellaneous commodities and services Miscellaneous Table 3 The sectors in China Energy Statistical Yearbook related consumer expen Consumer expenditure The related se Food Food processi Clothing Textile indust products. Household facilities, articles and services Timber proce and electronic Medicine and medical services Medical and p Transport and communication services Electronic and Education, cultural and recreation services Papermaking education and Residence Production an production an products. Miscellaneous commodities and services Tobacco processi d tubers; beans and bean products; oil and fats; meat, poultry and related ke; milk and dairy products; other food; dinning out; food processing g materials; shoes; tailoring and laundering service fees. r goods; room decorations; bed articles; household articles for daily use; ls; household services. mmunication. ation services. lectricity, fuels and others. mmodities; services. re in Table 2 rs food production and beverage production. arments and other fiber products, and leather, furs, down and related g, bamboo, cane, palm fiber and straw products, furniture manufacturing uipment and machinery. rmaceutical products. lecommunications equipment and transportation equipment. paper products, printing and record medium reproduction, and cultural orts articles. pply of electric power, steam and hot water, production and supply of gas, upply of tap water, construction, non-metal mineral product and metal ng, and wholesale, retail trade and catering Energyu ¼ ðEIi X iÞUP; CO2u ¼ ðCIi X iÞUP; ARTICLE IN PRESS En se 0.2 0.1 0.0 0.2 0.0 0.5 4.0 0.2 y P i i Energyr ¼ P i ðEIi X iÞRP; CO2r ¼ PðCIi X iÞRP; where Energyu refers to the indirect energy use of urban residents, Energyr refers to indirect energy use of rural residents. i refers to the kind of cons