We thank participants at the 2015 NBER China meeting for helpful comments. Any opinions and conclusions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Board of Governors, its research staff, or the National Bureau of Economic Research. At least one co-author has disclosed a financial relationship of potential relevance for this research. Further information is available online at http://www.nber.org/papers/w22178.ack NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Energy production and industrial processes are crucial economic sectors accounting for about 62% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions globally in 2012. Eco-industrial parks are practical attempts to mitigate GHG emissions through cooperation among businesses and the local community in order to reduce waste and pollution, efficiently share resources, and help with the pursuit of sustainable development. This work developed a framework based on ecological network analysis to trace carbon metabolic processes in eco-industrial parks and applied it to a typical eco-industrial park in Beijing. Our findings show that the entire metabolic system is dominated by supply of primary goods from the external environment and final demand. The more carbon flows through a sector, the more influence it would exert upon the whole system. External environment and energy providers are the most active and dominating part of the carbon metabolic system, which should be the first target to mitigate emissions by increasing efficiencies. The carbon metabolism of the eco-industrial park can be seen as an evolutionary system with high levels of efficiency, but this may come at the expense of larger levels of resilience. This work may provide a useful modeling framework for low-carbon design and management of industrial parks.

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