China's rich provinces outsourcing emissions to poorer provinces IRVINE, Calif., June 11 (UPI) -- China is outsourcing carbon within its own borders, with rich coastal provinces outsourcing emissions to poorer provinces in the interior, a study indicates. Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, along with British and Chinese colleagues, said they found more developed areas such as Beijing and Shanghai are importing steel, heavy industrial equipment and other materials from provinces such as Inner Mongolia, where highly polluting manufacturing facilities produce the raw goods. The found up to 80 percent of emissions related to items consumed in the coastal provinces are actually released skyward in the less developed provinces in central and western China, an Irvine release said Tuesday. "This is regrettable, because the cheapest and easiest reductions -- the low-hanging fruit -- are in the interior provinces, where modest technological improvements could make a huge difference in emissions," UC-Irvine Earth system scientist Steve Davis said. Richer areas currently have much tougher targets, so it's easier for them to just buy goods made elsewhere, said Davis, who is also an attorney specializing in climate policy. A nationwide target that tracks emissions embodied in trade would go a long way toward solving the problem. But that's not what's happening. China's province-specific pollution abatement targets, adopted in 2009 as part of the Copenhagen Accord to cut the carbon dioxide emissions causing global climate change, are likely to encourage even more of this type of domestic outsourcing, Davis noted. "As the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide, China is a prominent and important example, struggling to balance rapid economic growth and environmental sustainability across provinces that are in very different stages of development," the researchers wrote in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences.