Abstract
To cope with climate change, China commits that it will strive to achieve carbon peaking by 2030. Using the Cointegration model and the Markov Chain model, this paper forecasts China’s carbon emissions during 2019–2030 in six scenarios, and assesses the contribution of optimizing the energy mix to China’s carbon peaking. The research obtains three main conclusions. Firstly, optimizing the energy mix will contribute to achieving China’s carbon peaking. In the economic slow-growth scenario, taking China’s planned target of energy mix (PTEM) into account, the carbon peaking year will be brought forward from 2028 to 2023. In the economic medium-speed-growth scenario, optimizing the energy mix will make China achieve carbon peaking in 2028. Without considering the PTEM, however, the carbon emissions will not peak before 2030. In the economic fast-growth scenario, the peaking year will not occur whether considering the PTEM or not, but the growth rate of carbon emissions with the PTEM will be far lower than that without considering the PTEM. Secondly, in all three economic growth scenarios, optimizing the energy mix will largely reduce the growth rate of carbon emissions, and thus significantly reduce the peak value of carbon emissions. Thirdly, optimizing the energy mix has a negative adjusting effect on the impact of economic growth on the growth rate of carbon emissions, and the negative effect rise as the economic growth rate increases.
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Notes
Data are from the China Statistical Yearbook 2020.
According to multiple lag-order selection criteria, the lag order of the VAR model is 3; due to limited space, the results are not shown in the paper detailly.
Data are from China Statistical Yearbook (2018).
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Financial support was provided by the Research Project of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Ministry of Education of People’s Republic of China in 2021 (grant number 21XJA790004) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant number 71673217).
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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. The idea and framework of the study was proposed by Feng Wang. The materials, data collection, and analysis were performed by H. D. Han, Liang Liu, and J. F. Zhao. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Feng Wang and H. D. Han and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Wang, F., Han, H., Liu, L. et al. Assessing the contribution of optimizing energy mix to China’s carbon peaking. Environ Sci Pollut Res 30, 18296–18311 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-23451-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-23451-5