Environmental Compliance Evolution of China’s Coal-fired Power Plants: A Satellite-based Geospatial Assessment

Keywords: Environmental compliance monitoring; Remote sensing and satellites; Geospatial data; China
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Air pollution and climate change are two global problems that share many common sources from the combustion of fossil fuels. Since the 11th Five-Year Plan, China has made tremendous progress in reducing the emission factors of conventional air pollutants through mainly end-of-pipe measures and of CO2 through thermal efficiency improvements in coal-fired power plants. Effective and efficient environmental governance has been critical to tackle previous problems of serious environmental noncompliance. Compliance monitoring plays a dominant role in enforcing environmental policies. However, the high cost of building and maintaining traditional Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) systems together with its subjective data distortion potential remain key barriers to effectively detecting and penalizing noncompliance firms and non-performing local governments. With years of improvements in retrieval algorithms, remote sensing can provide genuinely independent and parallel monitoring of thousands of coal-fired power plants. It has become a promising geospatial data source to be integrated with current MRV systems to help screen possible violations before on-site environmental inspections.
This study aims to evaluate the temporal and geospatial applicability of satellite observations in environmental compliance monitoring on China’s coal-fired power plants, and also provides time-space views of the environmental compliance evolution of China’s coal-fired power plants. The study results can not only benefit environmental governance in China, but also in other developing countries where local compliaince monitoring system is less developed.