Hotspots of reactive nitrogen loss in China: Production, consumption, spatiotemporal trend and reduction responsibility☆
Graphical abstract
Section snippets
Main finding
We demonstrate that <20% of the Chinese territory contributed >90% of the national Nr loss since 1990, geographical disparity in Nr loss has increased and fair share of Nr loss reduction obligation should target more on the demand side.
Nr budget module
The Nr budget module was extended by Nr flow analysis that transforms all biomass flows in the model into Nr flows. In this study, the Nr budget calculations for high-resolution assessment of Nr loss were based on our previously developed human-environment coupled N cycle model that considers loss from agriculture (including cropland, livestock, forest and aquaculture), industry, human consumption, and waste management (Luo et al., 2018). We developed and applied the model to all 31 Chinese
Spatio-temporal analysis of Nr loss hotspots
We found that there were significant temporal and spatial variations in Nr loss intensity across regions in China. During the rapid development period in China (1980–2015), the total Nr loss (including production and consumption Nr loss) increased by 170% (from 20.2 to 54.5 Tg N yr−1, Fig. S1), far exceeding the growth rate on a global scale. It took nearly a century to double the Nr loss worldwide after the invention of Haber-Bosch N fixation technology (about 100.0 Tg N yr−1 in 1910 and
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
We thank Bin Chen from Tsinghua University (China) for his advice on the Environmentally Extended Multi-region Input−Output Analysis (EE-MRIO).
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This paper has been recommended for acceptance by Dr. Jörg Rinklebe.
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These authors contributed equally to this work.