Traditional consumption-based greenhouse gas emissions accounting attributed the gap between consumption-based and production-based emissions to international trade. Yet few attempts have analyzed the temporal deviation between current emissions and future consumption, which can be explained through changes in capital stock. Here we develop a dynamic model to incorporate capital stock change in consumption-based accounting. The new model is applied using global data for 1995–2009. Our results show that global emissions embodied in consumption determined by the new model are smaller than those obtained from the traditional model. The emissions embodied in global capital stock increased steadily during the period. However, capital plays very different roles in shaping consumption-based emissions for economies with different development characteristics. As a result, the dynamic model yields similar consumption-based emissions estimation for many developed countries comparing with the traditional model, but it highlights the dynamics of fast-developing countries.

The recent trend of rapid urbanization draws more and more concerns on the land use pattern in China. This study employs an ecological input-output model to reveal the impact of domestic consumption and international trade on cultivated land distributions in China during 1987-2007. According to the high-sectoral-resolution dataset, Agriculture and Food Processing are identified as the two key sectors which contribute the largest volumes of embodied cultivated land to meet household food demand in 2007. The indicators of production- and consumption-based cultivated land are highly correlated during the research period: both experience a phase of stability during 1987-1995, then a boom from 1995 to 1997, and a steady decrease afterward. Although the total cultivated land use in China is fluctuating, the embodied intensity shows a declining trend from 7.12 ha/thousand Yuan in 1987 to 0.43 ha/thousand Yuan in 2007, with an annual decrease rate of 13.09%. With respect to trade pattern, the Agriculture sector is China's largest net importer of cultivated land, in contrast to the Textile sector as the largest net exporter. When China is shown to be a net embodied cultivated land exporter throughout the concerned years, the variation of embodied cultivated land balance is closely related to the country's international trade pattern.Department of Building and Real Estat