Emissions Intensity Targeting: From China's 12th Five Year Plan to its Copenhagen Commitment

Yingying Lu (), Alison Stegman () and Yiyong Cai

CAMA Working Papers from Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis, Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University

Abstract: China is currently the world’s largest single source of fossil fuel related CO2 emissions. In response to pressure from the international community, and in recognition of its role in global climate change mitigation, the Chinese government has announced a series of climate policy commitments, in both the Copenhagen Accord and its domestic 12th 5 Year Plan, to gradually reduce emissions intensity by 2020. Emissions intensity reduction commitments differ significantly from emission level reduction commitments that are commonly adopted by developed economies. In this paper, we investigate the economic implications of China’s recent commitments to reduce emissions intensity, and highlight the complexities involved in modelling intensity targets under uncertainty. Using G-Cubed, an intertemporal, computable general equilibrium model of the world economy, we show that China’s emissions intensity targets could be achieved with a range of low and high growth emissions level trajectories corresponding to low and high growth GDP scenarios, which lead to different welfare consequences.

Keywords: China; Emissions intensity targeting; Climate policy; G-Cubed model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C68 D58 E37 Q43 Q54 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2012-10
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cama.crawford.anu.edu.au/sites/default/fil ... stegman_cai_2012.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Emissions intensity targeting: From China's 12th Five Year Plan to its Copenhagen commitment (2013)
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:een:camaaa:2012-45

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CAMA Working Papers from Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis, Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Cama Admin ().