Interregional coal flow and its environmental loads transfer in Shanxi Province

For the low price of coal and ineffective environmental management in mining area,China is in the dilemma of the increasing coal demand and the serious environmental issues in mining area.The more coal that is exported from a region,the more heavily it suffers from the environmental impacts of coal export.In this paper,the temporal and spatial process of exporting coal from Shanxi to other provinces of China is traced between 1975 and 2005.The coal net export of Shanxi increased to 370.69 million tonnes in 2005,representing an average annual growth rate of 7.5％ from 1975 to 2005.With the increase of the amount of coal export from Shanxi,the Environmental Loads Transfer (ELT) that import provinces input to mining areas of Shanxi are rising.Effective means of internalizing the environmental externality of ELT lie in:1) setting up a coal sustainable development fund to restore environment of coal mining area; 2) enforcing environment tax,financial transfer payment and transferring advantage technology of pollution reduction to coal export area; and 3) reducing coal regional flow by reducing coal demand from power generation and heating and other industries.