Abstract
Issues on climate change have been recognized as serious challenges for regional sustainable development both at a global and local level. Given the background that most of the artificial carbon emissions are resulted from the energy consumption sector and the energy is also the key element resource for economic development, this paper investigated the relationship between CO2 emission, fossil energy consumption, and economic growth in the period 1970–2008 of nine European countries, based on the approach of Granger Causality Test, followed by the risk analysis on impacts of CO2 reduction to local economic growth classified by the indicator of causality degree. The results show that there are various feedback causal relationships between carbon emission, energy consumption and economic growth, with both unidirectional and dual-directional Granger causality. The impact of reducing CO2 emission to economic growth varies between countries as well.
Highlights
IntroductionGlobal climate change has been a hot topic since the end of the 20th century (see, for instance, [1,2,3]), and it is currently a major concern and challenge confronting countries in the world [4], for example, the report of IPCC4 pointed that it was very likely (more than 90% of probability) that global warming was related to the increasing of greenhouse gases (GHG) over the past 50 years [5]
Global climate change has been a hot topic since the end of the 20th century, and it is currently a major concern and challenge confronting countries in the world [4], for example, the report of IPCC4 pointed that it was very likely that global warming was related to the increasing of greenhouse gases (GHG) over the past 50 years [5].Concerning climate change mitigation and adaption, the Kyoto Protocol is a very important step for reducing GHG emissions, and, broader participation and deeper cuts in GHG emissions are essential for any post-Kyoto agreement [6]
The key issue for reaching a consensus on GHG emission reduction is the concern on its impact to local economic development [7], either in developed regions or in developing and emerging countries
Summary
Global climate change has been a hot topic since the end of the 20th century (see, for instance, [1,2,3]), and it is currently a major concern and challenge confronting countries in the world [4], for example, the report of IPCC4 pointed that it was very likely (more than 90% of probability) that global warming was related to the increasing of greenhouse gases (GHG) over the past 50 years [5]. A case study for Brazil shows that the business-as-usual CO2 emissions in 2040 from energy use and industrial processes would be almost three times as high as those in 2010, while the current policy aims to lower emissions intensity of the overall economy by 36–39 percent by 2020 [18] Another analysis on carbon reduction in China indicates that the region with a lower reduction benchmark and higher decoupling elasticity value has more difficulty in achieving the emission reduction targets without powerful relevant policy [19], and a provincial level case study illustrates that with the rapid economic development, CO2 emission in Jiangsu province rose from 1, 88 × 108 t in 1995 to 5, 20 × 104 t in 2009, with an average annual growth rate of 7.54% [20]. Based on the statistical data in the open database of World Bank, nine European countries, namely, Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and United Kingdom are selected to investigate the causal relationship between GDP growth, energy consumption and CO2 emissions in the period of 1970–2008, and followed by the evaluation on the possible impacts of CO2 emissions reduction to economic development by ranking the classes based on the causality degree results
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