Driving forces of household carbon emissions in China: A spatial decomposition analysis

Abstract

China has strong policies to increase consumption and rebalance the economy away from capital investments. Since the total household carbon emissions (HCEs) grew 19% between 2007 and 2012, the study of driving forces from the spatial perspective provides insights into meeting these policy goals. To understand how to reduce HCEs across China, we analyze the driving factors of urban and rural household carbon emissions (HCEs) in 30 provinces in 2012. We distinguish two emission sources: direct (e.g. combustion of coal in the home), and indirect (emissions occurring along the supply chain of goods and services consumed by households), and analyze five factors for both urban/rural and direct/indirect emissions: population, income per capita, emission factors (emission improvements in technology), energy/consumption structure (changes in consumption), and energy/consumption intensity. Moreover, we aggregate the first two factors as the ‘scale’ effect and the latter three as the ‘effort’ effect, and explore their decoupling relationship. We find that the scale effect from income and population was the major driver of high urban HCEs in most of coastal provinces, up to 222% higher than the national average. The high HCEs in non-coastal industrial provinces (e.g. Inner Mongolia) were due to the limited improvements in the effort effect, specifically limited technology improvements, up to 101% than the national average. Almost all urban areas in coastal provinces achieved strong or weak decoupling, with the northeastern, central, western provinces witnessing negative decoupling. Urban areas in the main industrial provinces (Hebei, Heilongjiang and Inner Mongolia) showed the largest negative decoupling with values of −2.2, −3.0 and −2.7, respectively, due to a larger share of coal consumption and higher energy intensity within urban areas. Therefore, under the background of regional convergence, making larger efforts to reducing the HCEs in non-coastal provinces is critical for promoting a low-carbon transition in the household consumption.