Abstract
Designing inter-regional and inter-provincial responsibility-sharing mechanisms for climate change mitigation requires the knowledge of carbon distributions. This study is the first to use a two-sector (i.e., productive and household sectors) inequality decomposition approach to examine the regional, provincial, and national inequalities of per capita CO2 emissions (CPC) in China, as well as their determinants. We show that the CPC inequality index in China increased from 1.1364 in 2000 to 2.3688 in 2017, with the productive sector accounting for 91.42% of this expansion and households responsible for the rest. The production-side per capita output level, energy efficiency, energy structure, and industrial structure explain 69.01%, 12.81%, 5.57%, and 4.03% of these inequalities, respectively. Further, the household per capita energy consumption and energy structure explain only 8.12% and 0.46%, respectively. Therefore, future responsibility-sharing mechanisms for climate mitigation need to be formulated taking mainly the productive sector into account.
Highlights
Over the past decade, the poor performance of governments regarding climate change means that, if the Paris agreement is to be achieved, countries worldwide will need to increase their expenditure fourfold or complete the work needed in one third of the time[1]
From 2000 to 2017, the capita CO2 emissions (CPC) of Ningxia, Inner Mongolia, Qinghai, and Xinjiang maintained at high levels, while those of Jiangxi, Hainan, Guangxi, and Anhui maintained at relatively low levels
The results show that the main factors driving the differences of CPC are per capita gross domestic product (GDP) (ΔpED), energy intensity (ΔpEI), industrial structure (ΔpIS), and energy consumption per capita (ΔlPE), consistent with the results for the regional differences
Summary
The poor performance of governments regarding climate change means that, if the Paris agreement is to be achieved, countries worldwide will need to increase their expenditure fourfold or complete the work needed in one third of the time[1]. The main determinants of consumption-based carbon emissions include the development of global capital stock and international capital participation, both being important for fast-developing c ountries[4]. Coupled with the imbalances in inter-regional and inter-provincial economic development and the uneven population distribution, China’s per capita CO2 emissions (CPC) are worth exploring. Extant studies have shown that production- and consumption-based carbon emissions increased faster in less developed regions compared to developed ones during 2007–20107. China’s C O2 emissions will peak between 2021 and 2025, which is approximately 5–10 years ahead of the Paris agreement current 2030 target, and the challenges that different Chinese cities face in achieving low-carbon development vary according to their economic structure, urban form, and geographical location[8]. Most studies on carbon inequality are based on the Gini, Theil, and Atkinson indices, as well as the variation coefficient, which lack joint discussion on inequality and its underlying causes
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