四川省绿色发展促进会

Abstract

Lacking systematic supply-use information of agricultural biomass and food products within China makes the existing provincial environmental pressure assessments (e.g., water consumption) either not detailed enough (e. g.,  by  the  input-output  table-based  approach)  or  not  comprehensive  enough  (e.g.,  by  the  process-based approach). This study develops a symmetric inter-provincial multi-regional input-output (MRIO) model that hybridizes the physical food and agricultural biomass system with the monetary supply chain of China. First, we construct the inter-provincial supply, use, and input-output tables in physical units of 84 agriculture, food and forestry products. These physical supply/use/MRIO tables systematically capture agri-food product flows, at an unprecedented  level  of  product  detail,  along  domestic  supply  chains  within  China.  Then  we  integrate  the physical MRIO table of agri-food products into the monetary all-sector MRIO table to construct a symmetric hybrid MRIO table of China. The application of our hybrid MRIO model to the case of provincial blue water footprint assessments reveals that the hybrid model enhances both the monetary MRIO table-based approach and the process-based approach from different aspects. For instance, the hybrid MRIO model can reduce the un-certainty of monetary MRIO modeling due to the aggregation of products with different environmental properties into homogeneous sectors. Lastly, uncertainty analysis is implemented to quantify the main sources of uncertainties, and understand the reliability of our new hybrid MRIO model for future sustainable development design.