Decoupling Analysis of the Environmental Mountainwith Case Studies from China

The resource-development trajectory of developed countries after the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can be portrayed as an environmental mountain (EM). It is important for developing countries to decouple their resource use from economic growth and tunnel through the EM. In this study, we embedded the decoupling indicators for resource use and waste emissions into EM curves to quantify China's progress in tunneling through the EM over a specific time period. Five case studies regarding the conditions required for decoupling energy consumption, crude steel production, cement production, CO2 emissions, and SO2 emissions from economic growth in China were conducted. The results indicated that during 1985-2010 the trajectories of energy consumption, and CO2 and SO2 emissions in China met the requirements for tunneling through the EM, but the trajectories of cement and steel production did not. Based on these results, suggestions regarding China's environmental policies are provided to enable the country to tunnel through the EM.