Determinants of stagnating carbon intensity in China

Dabo Guan (), Stephan Klasen, Klaus Hubacek, Kuishuang Feng, Zhu Liu, Kebin He, Yong Geng and Qiang Zhang ()
Additional contact information
Dabo Guan: Tsinghua-Leeds Joint Low Carbon City Research Programme, Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Earth System Modelling, Centre for Earth System Science, Tsinghua University
Klaus Hubacek: University of Maryland
Kuishuang Feng: University of Maryland
Zhu Liu: Sustainability Science Program and Energy Technology Innovation Policy Project, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Kebin He: State Key Joint Laboratory of Environment Simulation and Pollution Control, School of Environment, Tsinghua University
Yong Geng: School of Environmental Science and Technology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Qiang Zhang: Tsinghua-Leeds Joint Low Carbon City Research Programme, Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Earth System Modelling, Centre for Earth System Science, Tsinghua University

Nature Climate Change, 2014, vol. 4, issue 11, 1017-1023

Abstract: Abstract China committed itself to reduce the carbon intensity of its economy (the amount of CO2 emitted per unit of GDP) by 40–45% during 2005–2020. Yet, between 2002 and 2009, China experienced a 3% increase in carbon intensity, though trends differed greatly among its 30 provinces. Decomposition analysis shows that sectoral efficiency gains in nearly all provinces were offset by movement towards a more carbon-intensive economic structure. Such a sectoral shift seemed to be heavily affected by the growing role of investments and capital accumulation in China’s growth process which has favoured sectors with high carbon intensity. Panel data regressions show that changes in carbon intensity were smallest in sectors dominating the regional economy (so as not to endanger these large sectors, which are the mainstay of the provincial economy), whereas scale and convergence effects played a much smaller role.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (54)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2388 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
Working Paper: Determinants of stagnating carbon intensityin China
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:nat:natcli:v:4:y:2014:i:11:d:10.1038_nclimate2388

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nclimate/

DOI: 10.1038/nclimate2388

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Climate Change is currently edited by Bronwyn Wake

More articles in Nature Climate Change from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().