Achieving air pollutant emission reduction targets with minimum abatement costs:An enterprise-level allocation method with constraints of fairness and feasibility

For achieving air pollutant emission reduction targets,total pollutant amount control is being continuously promoted in China.However,the traditional pattern of pollutant emission reduction allocation regardless of economic cost often results in unreasonable emission reduction pathways,and industrial enterprises as the main implementers have to pay excessively high costs.Therefore,this study adopted economic efficiency as its main consideration,used specific emission reduction measures(ERMs)of industrial enterprises as minimum allocation units,and constructed an enterprise-level pollutant emission reduction allocation(EPERA)model with minimization of the total abatement cost(TAC)as the objective function,and fairness and feasibility as constraints for emission reduction allocation.Taking City M in China as an example,the EPERA model was used to construct a Pareto optimal frontier and obtain the optimal trade-off result.Results showed that under basic and strict emission reduction regulations,the TAC of the optimal trade-off point was reduced by 46.40%and 45.77%,respectively,in comparison with that achieved when only considering fairness,and the Gini coefficient was 0.26 and 0.31,respectively.The abatement target was attained with controllable cost and relatively fair and reasonable allocation.In addition,enterprises allocated different emission reduction quotas under different ERMs had specific characteristics that required targeted optimization of technology and equipment to enable them to achieve optimal emission reduction effects for the same abatement cost.