Multi-Agents-Based Modeling and Simulation for Carbon Permits Trading in China: A Regional Development Perspective.

China has been actively taking actions to control carbon emissions and promoting development of a carbon market. However, there are many disadvantages in a carbon market, owing to various designs and policies still under trial and implementation. Adopting the multi-agents technique, we constructed a framework about national carbon market to estimate the effect of a different design of policy made on the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) and environment. In particular, national and regional abatement policies were analyzed in our study. The results showed the carbon-trading mechanism can effectively reduce carbon emissions and make a negative impact on GDP. National abatement can neither be too high nor too low for reducing carbon emissions and maintaining economic stability. For different regions, the central region was impacted the most by a carbon trading mechanism, and the east region was the opposite. Moreover, the "sweeping approach" policy should be replaced by a regional "discriminating policy" because the abatement requirement to the western region was low and to the eastern region was relatively high, which is more beneficial to China's regional development.

Managing Risk Aversion for Low-Carbon Supply Chains with Emission Abatement Outsourcing.

Reducing carbon emissions, including emission abatement outsourcing at the supply-chain level, is becoming a significant but challenging problem in practice. Confronting this challenge, we therefore break down the practice to focus on a low-carbon supply chain consisting of one supplier, one manufacturer and one third-party emission-reducing contractor. The contractor offers a carbon reduction service to the manufacturer. In view of the increasing proportion of Greenhouse Gases (GHG) emissions and absence of carbon reduction policies in developing countries, we adopt the prospect of consumers' low-carbon preferences to capture the demand sensitivity on carbon emission. By exploiting the Mean-Variance (MV) model, we develop a supply chain game model considering risk aversion. Comparing the supply chain performances of the cases under risk neutrality and risk aversion, we investigate the impact of the risk aversion of the supplier and the manufacturer on the low-carbon supply chain performances, respectively. We show that the risk aversion of chain members will not influence the relationship underlain by the profit-sharing contract between the manufacturer and contractor, whereas they may extend the supplier's concerning range. Although the manufacturer's risk aversion has a positive impact on the wholesale price, interestingly, the supplier's impact on the wholesale price is negative. Furthermore, we propose a contract to coordinate the risk-averse low-carbon supply chain by tuning the aversion levels of the supplier and the manufacturer, respectively. Through numerical study, we draw on managerial insights for industrial practitioners to adopt a low carbon strategy potentially by managing the risk attitudes along the supply chain channel.

Sustainability of biofuels and renewable chemicals production from biomass.

In the sectors of biofuel and renewable chemicals the big feedstock demand asks, first, to expand the spectrum of carbon sources beyond primary biomass, second, to establish circular processing chains and, third, to prioritize product sectors exclusively depending on carbon: chemicals and heavy-duty fuels. Large-volume production lines will reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emission significantly but also low-volume chemicals are indispensable in building 'low-carbon' industries. The foreseeable feedstock change initiates innovation, securing societal wealth in the industrialized world and creating employment in regions producing biomass. When raising the investments in rerouting to sustainable biofuel and chemicals today competitiveness with fossil-based fuel and chemicals is a strong issue. Many countries adopted comprehensive bioeconomy strategies to tackle this challenge. These public actions are mostly biased to biofuel but should give well-balanced attention to renewable chemicals as well.