Study On The Impact Factors Of Carbon Emissions And The Emission Reduction Policy In Beijing

With the rapid development of China’s economy, the energy consumption based on fossil fuel continues to increase. Air pollution, greenhouse effect and other environmental problems have become increasingly prominent, seriously restricting the sustainable development of China’s economy. As the capital of China, Beijing has a special political status, it should play a leading role in mitigating and adapting to climate change. However, the endowment of resources in Beijing is relatively scarce, its ecological environment is fragile, and, at the same time, population, transportation, energy and environment are still the bottlenecks restricting the sustainable development in Beijing. In this context, under the guidance of energy, environment and economic growth(3E) theory, this paper study the affecting factors on carbon emission change and their contribution, and analyze the decoupling relationship between the carbon emissions from different industries and economic growth, thus provide the basis to formulate mitigation policies and achieve low carbon development. The main research contents and results are as follows:(1) Systematically describe the current situations of economic development, energy consumption and CO2 emissions in Beijing from 1995 to 2014. Through the analysis, it can be concluded that economic development in Beijing is fast, most of the GDP growth rates are higher than the national average levels, the industrial structure is optimized gradually. Total energy consumption continues to increase, but the energy intensity is declined steadily, energy structure is more diverse. Carbon emissions display an upward trend with the increase of energy consumption, followed by a gradual decline in the “Twelfth Five Year”. In general, carbon intensity has been decreased while the energy efficiency has been increased.(2) Dynamic analysis of the “3E” system based on the VAR model. According to the requirements of constructing the model, the stationary test and cointegration test are carried out on energy intensity, carbon intensity and economic growth, which confirm that there is a long-run cointegration relationship among the three variables. Then build the VAR model, and use the impulse response function and variance decomposition to analyze the dynamic effect of them. The results show that there is a long-term correlation among energy intensity, carbon intensity and economic growth.(3) Decomposition of carbon emissions based on the generalized Fisher index method. Respectively analyze the drivers of carbon emissions in Beijing and two largest carbon-emitting source: the transportation sector and the residential sector. The results show that the economic growth and population size have stimulating effect on the growth of carbon emissions in Beijing, while energy intensity and energy structure display the inhibition effect. In terms of transportation, economic growth, energy intensity, population size and output value of unit traffic turnover are positive drivers for carbon emissions in the transportation sector. The transportation intensity is the main constraint while, the inhibition effect of energy structure is not obvious. For the residential carbon emissions in Beijing, the improvement of per capita income and population size play the pulling role in adding residential carbon emissions, energy intensity and energy structure have negative effect on residential carbon emissions. The average consumption propensity has negative effect on carbon emissions in urban area, but has no effect on the carbon emissions from rural residents. The transfer of population from rural area to urban area in the process of urbanization will increase the residential carbon emissions.(4) Analyze the decoupling status of carbon emissions from different industries and economic growth based on Tapio decoupling index. The results show that the decoupling relationships between carbon emissions and economic growth in agriculture, industry and other tertiary industries, including wholesale and retail industry and accommodation and catering industry are good. The decoupling conditions of construction sector and transportation sector are not ideal initially but then improved. By comparing the decoupling states of subdivided industries in 2005-2009 and 2010-2014, it can be concluded that the decoupling states have improved in most sectors, but there are still some sectors’ decoupling states have deteriorated. Emission reduction should focus on transportation and other departments with larger emission reduction potential.(5)The existing low-carbon development policies in Beijing have been carried out and the meaning of relative emission reduction indicator for the emission reduction target has been analyzed. The thesis interprets the energy saving and emission reduction target through scenario analysis, and on the basis of empirical research, policy recommendations have been proposed in terms of the energy intensity, energy structure, industrial structure, low carbon transportation, low carbon life, etc.