Evaluation Of Carbon Emission Reduction Performance Based On Environmental DEA Approach

In recent years, carbon emission reduction, which gradually emerges as an issue of great importance in the field of academic research and policy making, has drawn great attention from all countries in the world due to the deteriorating currents in global climate change, giving rise to a set of well-targeted policies. However, it is of necessity to evaluate the carbon emission reduction performance in regions and sectors all over the world and quantify potentials in carbon emission reduction prior to policy making with support for successive policy implementation.Subsequently, environmental DEA approach, which exhibits outstanding advantage in efficiency assessment, is employed in this paper to have an overall appraisal of carbon emission reduction performances in global top-emitters. Known as origin of enormous carbon emission, low carbon emission performance in China leads to high potentials in carbon emission reduction, compared with other top carbon emission countries. Therefore, the environmental DEA approach is well-established in the current paper aiming at evaluating the carbon emission performance of 29 Chinese provincial administrative regions by computing potential carbon emission reductions based on energy conservation technology (ECT) and energy structural adjustment (ESA) in 2005-2007 data panel as the main innovations, which distinguish the effectiveness of ECT and ESA in prompting carbon emission reduction, deprives the interplay of these two factors and analyze the feasibility of the prospective aim in 2020 pledged by Chinese government under three scenarios to predict the ESA range.It is found that regional disparity exists somewhat in ECT use and most provinces have over-dependence on coal consumption because of the irrational energy structure. Apparently, coal-powered generation accounts for a high proportion in power sector that is the major energy-consuming industry, on basis of which identical approach probes into carbon emission performance of power sector of 29 provincial administrative regions. Such conclusions are presented as follows: on one hand, it is effective to promote energy conservation technologies and reduce inter-regional technological disparity for carbon emission reduction in technical inefficient regions; on the other hand, most of the provincial administrative regions under research show apparent irrationality in energy structure and over-dependence on coal consumption, which requires energy structural adjustment for carbon emission reduction. Therefore, enormous emission reduction can be realized on condition of promotion for energy conservation technologies, development for renewable energy, ascending proportion in non-fossil energy, deliverability reinforcement of low-carbon energy as well as energy structural adjustment, by which the prospective aim in 2020 can also be achieved.As a consequence, a couple of corresponding suggestions are proposed with discussion for disadvantage of existing approach, heading for methodology extension and improvement at the end of this paper.