Driving forces of temporal-spatial differences in CO2 emissions at the city level for China\u2019s transport sector

Yuxiang Liu,Songyuan Yang,Xianmei Liu,Pibin Guo,Keyong Zhang

doi:10.1007/s11356-020-12235-4

Abstract

The paper aims to investigate the influencing factors that drive the temporal and spatial differences of CO2 emissions for the transportation sector in China. For this purpose, this study adopts a Logistic Mean Division Index (LMDI) model to explore the driving forces of the changes for the transport sector’s CO2 emissions from a temporal perspective during 2000–2017 and identifies the key factors of differences in the transport sector’s CO2 emissions of China’s 15 cities in four key years (i.e., 2000, 2005, 2010, and 2017) using a multi-regional spatial decomposition model (M-R). Based on the empirical results, it was found that the main forces for affecting CO2 emissions of the transport sector are not the same as those from temporal and spatial perspectives. Temporal decomposition results show that the income effect is the dominant factor inducing the increase of CO2 emissions in the transport sector, while the transportation intensity effect is the main factor for curbing the CO2 emissions. Spatial decomposition results demonstrate that income effect, energy intensity effect, transportation intensity effect, and transportation structure effect are important factors which result in enlarging the differences in city-level CO2 emissions. In addition, the less-developed cities and lower energy efficiency cities have greater potential to reduce CO2 emissions of the transport sector. Understanding the feature of CO2 emissions and the influencing factors of cities is critical for formulating city-level mitigation strategies of the transport sector in China. Overall, it is expected that the level of economic development is the main factor leading to the differences in CO2 emissions from a spatial-temporal perspective.

Highlights

Climate change has been regarded as the most serious challenge and core issue faced by humans to achieve sustainable development of the socioeconomic system (Zhu et al 2019)
We described the changing trend of CO2 emissions and the characteristics of temporal and spatial of China’s transport sector; at the second step, we deeply explored the influencing factors of CO2 emissions at the city level in China’s transport sector based on Logistic Mean Division Index (LMDI) decomposition analysis method from the temporal perspective, and simultaneously compare the differences in CO2 emissions of different transport sectors and the impacting factors between the urban agglomeration and national average using M-R spatial decomposition analysis method from the spatial angles; and at the last step, we provided some useful references or policy suggestions for China’s transport sector from the city-level to reduce CO2 emissions
The contributions of various factors to CO2 emission are different during the study period; income effect (ΔCAG) was the dominant driving force that leads to the increase in city-level CO2 emissions while the transportation intensity effect (ΔCAI) was responsible for most cities to reduce the CO2 emissions, which were similar with previous literature, i.e., Wang et al (2011); Achour and Belloumi (2016); Li et al (2016); and Zhang et al (2019)

Summary

Introduction

Climate change has been regarded as the most serious challenge and core issue faced by humans to achieve sustainable development of the socioeconomic system (Zhu et al 2019). Largescale transportation services will consume a great deal of energy, accounting for approximately one-third of the total energy consumption of the world and inevitably produce 23% of CO2 emissions (IEA 2017). The transport sector has been identified as one of the major contributors to CO2 emissions and degradation of the environment. It has been regarded as the second-largest energy-consuming sector after the industrial sector (Hao et al 2014; Yin et al 2015). Some scholars predicted that China’s transport sector’s energy consumption and CO2 emissions will be increased by approximately 50% by 2030 and by 80% by 2050 (Guo et al 2014; Xu and Lin 2016; Lv et al 2019). It is critical for the policymakers to reduce the total emissions from the transport sector

Results

Discussion

Conclusion