Evaluation and comparative analysis of urban public institutions energy-environmental efficiency from the perspective of dual carbon

Abstract

The ‘dual carbon’ goals are China's long-term development strategy for low greenhouse gas emissions in the mid-21st century, and energy conservation and emission reduction are major decisions and plans made by the Chinese government to achieve the ‘dual carbon’ goals. Energy conservation in public institutions is the focus of China's 14th Five-Year Plan, the accurate evaluation of energy efficiency is a prerequisite for energy conservation in public institutions and an important element in achieving China's dual carbon goals. Therefore, we propose the Slacks Based Measure-Data Envelopment Analysis (SBM-DEA) model considering carbon emissions to evaluate the energy-environmental efficiency of urban public institutions in subtropical regions of China and apply the Gini coefficient to measure the unbalanced development of energy-environmental efficiency in similar institutions. The results demonstrate that: (1) The current energy-environmental efficiency of urban public institutions is 0.83, and there are significant differences in the energy-environmental efficiency of different types of public institutions; (2) The average value of institutional scale efficiency is close to the optimal level, and the main factor currently limiting the energy-environmental efficiency of urban public institutions is pure technical efficiency; (3) The average energy-environmental efficiency of the model considering the unexpected carbon emission indicators of public institutions is 1.82% higher than the model without carbon emission. Due to its non-parametric nature, this method shows good applicability for multi-input and multi-output energy-environmental efficiency assessment, which could be a guideline for quantifying the energy-saving potential of public institutions.