Impacts of poverty eradication on carbon neutrality in China

Abstract

China is facing challenges to tackle the threat of climate change while reducing social inequality. Poverty eradication requires improvement in the living conditions of low-income households, which leads in turn to higher carbon footprints and may undermine the efforts of climate change mitigation. Previous studies have assessed the climate impacts of poverty eradication, but few have quantified how the additional carbon emissions of poverty eradication are shared at the subnational level in China and the impact on China’s climate targets. We investigated the recent trend of carbon footprint inequality in China’s provinces and estimated the climate burden of different poverty reduction schemes, measured by increased carbon emissions. The results indicate that poverty eradication will not impede the achievement of national climate targets, with an average annual household carbon footprint increase of 0.1%–1.2%. However, the carbon emissions growth in less developed provinces can be 4.0%, five times that in wealthy regions. Less developed regions suffer a greater climate burden because of poverty eradication, which may offset carbon reduction efforts. Therefore, interregional collaboration is needed to coordinate inequality reduction with investments in low-carbon trajectories in all provinces.