摘要：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. Plain Language Abstract Mercury (Hg) is a highly toxic pollutant with severe adverse impacts on human health. The Minamata Convention on Mercury was signed in 2013 to protect human beings and ecosystems with strict Hg-control measures. China is the largest Hg emitter in the world, the center of the global Hg-control campaign, due to its intense production activities. However, as the “world factory” in the global supply chains, productions in China, along with its Hg emissions, are significantly affected by the development and changes of the global society and economy. This study reveals the driving effects of the global economy changes on atmospheric Hg emissions in China during 2005–2015. We find that the global economic structure transition (including the structures of production and consumption) has driven the increments of China's atmospheric Hg emissions in this period, in which the economic structural changes in nations other than China contribute relatively more. In particular, the effects of foreign nations' production structure, representing the production efficiency, were more extensive than those of China's. This study proves that, for the success of the Hg-control campaign in China and the whole world, all the nations should join hands to make the global production “greener.”.
关键词：mercury;economic structure transition;global production structure;Minamata Convention on Mercury;input-output analysis
