Prediction of China’s Carbon Peak Attainment Pathway from Both Production-Side and Consumption-Side Perspectives

Abstract

To achieve global sustainable development and actively respond to climate change, China, as the world’s largest energy consumer and carbon emitter, needs to save energy and reduce emissions without delay. By constructing LEAP-China production-side and LEAP-China consumption-side models, we predict the carbon emissions of China’s production side and consumption side in different scenarios from 2020 to 2050, respectively. The results show that under the current policies, neither the production side nor consumption side can achieve targeted peak carbon emissions by 2030, which is contrary to China’s current carbon emission policy. Under the sustainable development scenario, China’s production-side CO2 emissions would peak at 10,462.2 Mt in 2029, and China’s consumption-side CO2 emissions would peak 3 years later compared to the production side at 9904.3 Mt in 2032. Therefore, to achieve the peak for both the production and consumption side, we need to coordinate various policies and actively promote industrial restructuring and energy structure optimization. In terms of trade structure, China’s existing import and export trade structure should be adjusted to reduce the export of industrially manufactured goods and increase the proportion of technology-intensive products in foreign trade to realize the transformation from a high-carbon trade structure to a low-carbon trade structure.