China can reach carbon neutrality before 2050 by improving economic development quality

Guangyue Xu, Haoyun Dong, Zhenci Xu and Nishan Bhattarai

Energy, 2022, vol. 243, issue C

Abstract: As the largest carbon emission emitter, China has made a commitment to the international community to achieve carbon neutrality before 2060. While most literature suggests such a goal could be achieved mainly through slowing down economic growth, promoting energy transformation, and adjusting the industrial structure, little is known about how improving the economic development quality would have an impact on China's carbon emissions and achieving carbon neutrality goal. Here based on the environmental Kuznets curve model and scenario analysis, we explored future courses of carbon neutrality, in terms of CO2 emissions, in China under different scenarios of economic development quality. Results suggest that under the conventional, accelerated, and enhanced improvement scenarios, China could reach a carbon peak in 2027, 2026, and 2025 (3.5075, 3.5074, and 3.5066 billion tonnes, respectively), and then achieve the zero carbon emission goal in 2050, 2044 and 2040, respectively. However, achieving such an ambitious trajectory is contingent upon significant improvements in the economic development quality that China should focus on at present and in the future.

Keywords: Carbon peak; Carbon neutrality; Economic development quality; Scenario design; Zero emission (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (38)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544221033363
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:243:y:2022:i:c:s0360544221033363

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2021.123087

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().