Ph.D. student Xiangjie Chen, Associate Professor Kuishuang Feng, along with other coauthors have recently received the prestigious 2024 Highly Cited Paper Awards from Advances in Applied Energy, a renowned journal in the energy field with an Impact Factor of 16.47 in 2022. This accolade recognizes outstanding contributions from authors whose papers appeared in the journal between 2021 and 2023.
The award-winning paper, titled "Evidence of Decoupling Consumption-based CO2 Emissions from Economic Growth," addresses the phenomenon where certain countries have managed to decrease their production-based carbon emissions in the past decade. "We were motivated by the fact that several countries had reduced their carbon emissions. However, the way they achieve this is by outsourcing their emissions to other countries, which may potentially indirectly increase global emissions," said Chen.
Instead of focusing solely on the production-side perspective, the paper advocates for a consumption-based approach to assess a country's carbon footprint across global supply chains, offering a more comprehensive view of progress in decoupling economic growth from carbon emissions.
Although 23 countries have achieved absolute decoupling of GDP from consumption-based emissions, the paper highlights the temporary nature of this achievement, stressing the continuous efforts required to sustain it. The analysis identifies reducing emission intensity within domestic and imported supply chains as crucial for achieving decoupling, underlining the significance of decarbonizing supply chains and fostering international cooperation in emission control efforts.
In addition to its extensive citation in academic literature, the paper's key findings and conclusions have been integrated into the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), further demonstrating its impact on both academic community and environmental policy development.
Image: The award certificate issued by Advances in Applied Energy. Courtesy of Ph.D. student Xiangjie Chen.
