Global Economic Structure Transition Boosts Atmospheric Mercury Emissions in China

As the "world factory," China has the most massive anthropogenic atmospheric mercury (Hg) emissions in the world along with its intense production activities. The development of global society and economy, including technology development, consumption behavior evolution, population growth, and so on, would significantly affect China's production and thus the Hg emissions. Here we uncover critical global socioeconomic drivers of atmospheric Hg emission changes in China during 2005-2015. Results show that the transition of global economic structures (i.e., production and final demand structures) caused 179 tons of increase in China's atmospheric Hg emissions during this period if other factors remained constant, while the transition of foreign economic structures contributed as much as 83% (149 tons). More importantly, for the first time, we reveal the crucial role of production structure transition in foreign nations. The cumulative effect of foreign production structure transition during this period (93 tons) was larger than that of foreign final demand structure transition (56 tons). It is also far more extensive than the cumulative effect of China's production structure transition (9.5 tons). Previous studies on China's atmospheric Hg emissions driven by global final demand focused more on optimizing consumption behaviors. However, this study proves the significance of a greener global production structure for reducing anthropogenic atmospheric Hg emissions in China, thus implementing the Minamata Convention on Mercury.