Socio-economic analysis of the risk management of hexabromocyclododecane (HBCD) in China in the context of the Stockholm Convention

Socio-economic analysis (SEA) plays an important role in decision-making on risk management actions for certain chemicals under Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs) in developing countries. This paper showed the first holistic and quantitative SEA case study on that by developing a country-specific SEA framwork and methodologies and applying the case of HBCD phase-out in China under the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs). The study indicates that, under the possible scenarios of 10 years and 5 years , the economic costs of HBCD phase-out in China would be between 9.032 and 19.021 billion RMB. Although the total economic costs seems to be significant, it would only have a marginal impact on the house building industry with a likely cost increase by about 0.07‰-0.14‰. Meanwhile, the HBCD phase-out may render significant environmental and health benefits, including about 23-29 tons of HBCD release prevented to the environment, 1.142-1.469 million tons of potentially HBCD contained hazardous wastes avoided, along with significant reduction from 58% up to almost 100% in local environmental concentrations of HBCD, and about 0.0996-0.128 million workers at risk avoided and at least 3.067-4.033 billion RMB of the health care savings. While the scenario of phasing out HBCD over 10 years would be less costly than the scenario of that over 5 years, the later scenario suggested much greater environmental and health benefits for China.