China’s carbon accounting system in the context of carbon neutrality: Current situation, challenges and suggestions

Abstract

Global climate governance is currently at the stage of carbon neutrality. Improving the quality of emissions inventories at different levels has become a critical climate governance task, which not only contributes to the Global Stocktake but also helps verify compliance progress and address new trade barriers. This study provides a comprehensive review of international carbon accounting standards and guidelines while assessing the potential impact of upcoming carbon tax policies, such as the EU CBAM and the U.S. CCA. On this basis, the current situation and challenges of China's carbon emission accounting system are systematically analysed, and suggestions for improvement are proposed. The results show that carbon tax policies will increase the requirements for emission inventories and will strengthen the correlation between different levels. The improvement of China's carbon accounting system should be accelerated. Although the regional carbon accounting guidelines are already in line with international guidelines, further improvements are needed at the enterprise and product levels. New boundaries need to be set in China's corporate carbon accounting guidelines, and the speed of developing product carbon accounting guidelines should be increased. The quality of emissions inventories should be comprehensively improved by implementing a combination of policies, including corporate carbon information disclosure, green supply chain construction, activity data statistics and verification, and a dynamic emission factor database.