Analysis of total carbon emissions from transport in the world: A visibility graph network approach

Abstract

As a basic industry in the country’s development, the transportation industry has a significant relationship to its normal operation for developing and constructing the national economy. The increase in carbon emissions from transport is an increasingly growing problem, and countries worldwide are also taking measures to reduce emissions. Using time series data over the period from 1990 to 2016, this paper applies the visibility graph approach to transform it into a complex network and excavate some information about the data, then evaluates all countries based on the TOPSIS method. We find that the development of transportation is an important symbol to measure the degree of modernization of a country’s transportation, and low-income countries have lower carbon emissions due to slower transportation development. The results of transportation carbon emissions are especially encouraging for the Chinese government given its long-term and sustained efforts to expand railway and waterway infrastructure, and provide a new perspective for further research on the development trend of global transportation carbon emissions. Meanwhile, it is urgent to speed up the development and use of clean energy for economically developed countries.