The Effects Of Regional Residential Indirect CO₂Emissions In China

Abstract:According to the Key World Energy Statistics from IE A (2012), the global CO2emissions has reached31600Mt in2011.China has become the world’s largest emitter of CO2, accounting for26.9%of global carbon dioxide emissions. With the rapid development of social economy and living standards improve, people’s consumption of energy rapidly growing. Residential CO2emissions represent a significantly large proportion of all CO2emissions, making the Chinese household consumer sector second to the industry sector which is China’s largest energy consumer sector.A major part of the energy requirements and related carbon emissions in the economy of a country is allocated to the household sector, and that the indirect CO2emissions become more and more important. Therefore, the consumer research sector carbon emissions in recent years become academic research hotspot.Based on the input-output energy analysis combined with household expenditure data (IO-EA-basic), this paper calculates the Chinese regional indirect carbon emissions from residential consumption in2002and2007. Then we constructs a new Structural Decomposition Analysis (SDA) model to investigate the impacts of emission intensity, intermediate demand, consumption structure, consumption ratio, per capita consumption, urbanization, and population on residential indirect CO2emissions of four regions in China during2002-2007. Through the above analysis, we get the main conclusions as follows.(1) From2002to2007, the residential indirect CO2emissions in all regions of China showed an upward trend, and the eastern region saw the fastest rise.(2) Excluding the per capita consumption effect, urbanization effect is the most important contributor to the rise in China’s residential indirect CO2emissions. Urbanization effect influences most in the eastern region and has the smallest effect on the northeastern region. The consumption ratio effect decreases the residential indirect CO2emissions in all regions of China, especially in the eastern region. (3) Consumption structure effect increased the residential indirect CO2emissions in all regions of China, and the sectors contributing most are the health care and medical services sector and the transport and communication sector. However, the contributing rates of the two sectors contribute more to the central and western regions than to the eastern region.(4) Emission intensity effect remains to be the most crucial factor to decreasing the residential indirect CO2emissions in all regions of China and has similar contributions to all regions. Per capita consumption effect is the most crucial factor to the rise in the residential indirect CO2emissions in all regions and contributes most to the northeastern region. Population effect, to some extent, adds to the residential indirect CO2emissions and has the biggest influence on the eastern region.