Exploring the role of entertainment transition in mitigating consumption-side GHG emissions

Entertainment activities are one of the main sources of consumption carbon emissions. Very limited research, however, has been conducted in this area due to the complex interactions among the multiple economic sectors involving entertainment. By developing a multisource and heterogeneous data integrating method, we estimate the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of 18 types of entertainment activities based on more than 40.39 million instances of actual consumption data regarding 229,453 merchants across China's capital cities. The total GHG emissions of entertainment consumption were approximately 78.88 MtCO₂eq in 2020, with an average emission of 3.29 kgCO₂eq. "Business as usual" projections indicate that China's entertainment consumption emissions in capital cities will reach 2165.88 MtCO₂eq between 2020 and 2050; and the cumulative emissions could be reduced by up to 46% if mitigation strategies of sustainable transition, such as consumption habit adjustment, technological improvement, location reoptimization, and transportation transition, are adopted.