Will China Achieve Its Ambitious Goal?—Forecasting the CO2 Emission Intensity of China towards 2030

Yan Li,Yigang Wei,Zhang Dong

doi:10.3390/en13112924

Abstract

China has set out an ambitious target of emission abatement; that is, a 60–65% reduction in CO2 emission intensity by 2030 compared with the 2005 baseline level and emission peak realisation. This paper aimed to forecast whether China can fulfil the reduction target of CO2 emission intensity and peak by 2030 based on the historical time series data from 1990 to 2018. Four different forecasting techniques were used to improve the accuracy of the forecasting results: the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model and three grey system-based models, including the traditional grey model (1,1), the discrete grey model (DGM) and the rolling DGM. The behaviours of these techniques were compared and validated in the forecasting comparisons. The forecasting performance of the four forecasting models was good considering the minimum mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), demonstrating MAPE values lower than 2%. ARIMA showed the best forecasting performance over the historical period with a MAPE value of 0.60%. The forecasting results of ARIMA indicate that China would not achieve sufficient reductions despite its projected emission peak of 96.3 hundred million tons by 2021. That is, the CO2 emission intensity of China will be reduced by 57.65% in 2030 compared with the 2005 levels. This reduction is lower than the government goal of 60–65%. This paper presents pragmatic recommendations for effective emission intensity reduction to ensure the achievements of the claimed policy goals.

Highlights

Copenhagen and Cancun United Nations Climate Conference reiterated the goal of global climate cooperation, that is, the increasing world temperature should be controlled below 2 ◦ C
The claimed goal means that substantial commitments and efforts are needed to accelerate the arrivals of CO2 emission peaks and considerably reduce the global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions
In the forecasting competition related to CO2 emission trends, two loss functions were regarded as the criteria to estimate the forecasting performance: mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) and residual error [52]

Summary

Introduction

Copenhagen and Cancun United Nations Climate Conference reiterated the goal of global climate cooperation, that is, the increasing world temperature should be controlled below 2 ◦ C. The claimed goal means that substantial commitments and efforts are needed to accelerate the arrivals of CO2 emission peaks and considerably reduce the global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Global CO2 emissions should be halved by 2050 to achieve this goal, and the world should realise zero emissions by the end of this century [1]. ‘Low carbon’ indicates that socioeconomic development should minimise or avoid the reliance on carbon-based energy. The transitions in energy consumptions will contribute to the transformation of development patterns for achieving sustainability. This process is difficult because the stability and durability of the overall socioeconomic development must be guaranteed [5]. In the Energies 2020, 13, 2924; doi:10.3390/en13112924 www.mdpi.com/journal/energies

Objectives

Results

Conclusion