A Study On The Low-carbon Economy Of The Six Provinces In Central China: A Carbon Emission Reduction Approach

Global climate change, which is caused by greenhouse gas emissions, has brought increasingly serious effect on human development; to develop with low carbon is therefore becoming the appeal of global development. Taking into account the natural resources of six provinces in central China, the current industrial patterns, the important position in undertaking industrial transformation, and the strategic position in regional development of China in connecting the east and west, to develop with low carbon is vital important to the six provinces.From the perspective of energy consumption, by studying the economy and energy consumption history of six provinces in central China, this thesis discusses a low carbon economic development model that is based on carbon emission reduction.The changes of energy efficiency for the six central provinces from 1985 to 2008 are analyzed in this thesis, and it is found out that although the energy efficiency has been continuously rising,the speed is lower than that of the economic development, therefore the energy supply shortage was intensified by the continuously increasing energy consumption. The ECM model of panel data is used to analyze the relationship between energy consumption and economic growth for the six central provinces, and as indicated by the result, the energy consumption only has a long-term causality on economic growth, while the economic growth has both long and short term causality on energy consumption. Therefore, a short-term energy saving and emission reduction measure will not possibly have an obvious effect on the economic growth, which will conversely have an increasing demand for energy supply. LMDⅡdecomposition analysis method is furthermore applied to study the influence factors of energy consumption changes for the six central provinces, and it is shown by the result that the industry energy efficiency decrease has been the main influence factor. The industrial structure has only a positive effect on the energy intensity, and on the meanwhile, the increase of secondary industry proportion will promote the rise of energy intensity, but vice versa with the tertiary industry.As the final conclusion, this thesis proposes that the low carbon economic development model for central China should be based on the abundant natural resource and current industrial pattern, and the development of low carbon industry should speed up the industrialization process and push forward the optimization and rationalization of industrial structure, and promote new energy industry. Moreover, the mercerization of energy price and establishment of regional coordinating organization are the most important institutional conditions.