Factors Decomposition Model And Empirical Analysis Of Carbon Emissions From Residential Living Consumption In China

Under the current situation of global climate warming, saving energy and decreasing the carbon emission is becoming the great concern in each country and we are facing more pressure in China. In earlier researches, the majority of studies only focused on the production department but ignored the carbon emissions from household department. Along with the progress of China urbanization, carbon emissions from residential energy consumption are playing a more and more important role. This source of carbon emissions are divided into two parts:the direct carbon emissions and indirect carbon emissions from residential energy consumption. Due to the different levels and structures between urban and rural residential consumption, this paper will separate the analysis into these two parts.In this paper, the direct carbon emissions from urban and rural residential energy consumption in China from1996to2010are calculated based on carbon emission factor method. LMDI method is adopted to quantify each factor’s contribution to the changes of direct carbon emission. Meanwhile, the indirect carbon emissions in China in1997,2000,2002,2005,2007are computed based on input-output model, and structural decomposition analysis is conducted to get the changes in indirect carbon emissions.The results show that the carbon emissions from residential energy consumption kept increasing, but decreased in2002and2007. From the viewpoint of direct and indirect carbon emissions, the indirect carbon emissions are major sources and take account of more than80%. From the perspective of urban and rural areas, the carbon emissions from urban residential are higher than that from rural residential, and the gap between them is growing bigger. The major positive driving factors of direct carbon emissions are energy price and resident living standard, however. The main positive driving factors for the indirect carbon emissions are intermediate production technology and resident living standard, carbon emission intensity is the main negative driving factor. It shows that encouraging people to spend rationally, adopting a market-oriented energy pricing mechanism and changing the extensive economic pattern to enhance the economic’s sustainability are needed.