Abstract
Understanding the pathway of carbon emissions is an important basis for establishing a national climate strategy. In this paper, the change in China’s economic carbon intensity since its accession to the World Trade Organization has been analyzed with a time series decomposition analysis method. Four phases with distinctive features are defined, and the significant fluctuations in China’s economic carbon intensity after 2001 are explained in detail. From the phase-average perspective, the contributions of major factors to the economic carbon intensity change have evolved steadily, instead of through highly volatile change on a yearly basis, and the gradual changes have been caused mainly by the development of the industrial sectors. Induced by the new normal in economic development, the change of China’s economic carbon intensity has entered a new phase driven by multiple factors with economic structural improvement being the most important contributor, as well as the continuingly, though decreasingly, important factor of energy efficiency.
Highlights
Fast-growing economies account for the majority of the newly added carbon emissions worldwide, and their achievement in emissions control will have a significant impact on attaining the 2 ◦ C, or even 1.5 ◦ C, global target in abating global warming [1,2].China is the largest emitter of carbon emissions in the world currently
The results show that the Pearson correlation coefficients between any two factors of the energy efficiency of industrial sector, the energy efficiency of the construction sector, the energy efficiency of the commercial and service sectors, energy efficiency as a whole, and the change in China’s economic carbon intensity are all above
Note: Negative value represents the factor contributing to the decrease in economic carbon intensity; sectoral structure (SS), EF, and ES refer to sectoral effect, energy efficiency effect, and energy structure effect, respectively; agr, ind, con, ser, and HH refer to agricultural sector, industrial sector, construction sector, commercial and service sector, and household, respectively
Summary
Fast-growing economies account for the majority of the newly added carbon emissions worldwide, and their achievement in emissions control will have a significant impact on attaining the 2 ◦ C, or even 1.5 ◦ C, global target in abating global warming [1,2]. The structure of the Chinese economy has changed tremendously, with the commercial and service sector accounting for 42.8% of the economic structure in 2008 and rising rapidly to 50.2% in 2015 [3] In this case, some recent IDA decomposition analyses have illustrated that the weak international demand caused by the international financial crisis affected China’s export trade and mitigated China’s carbon emissions to a large extent in 2012 [31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42], few further conclusions on or evidence of the change in China’s carbon emission pathway have been reported as a result of time series decomposition analysis [17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25]. We can identify the transformation impact from its latest performance and from historical trends, which could confirm and improve our understanding of the latest characteristics in emission change
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