Study On The CO₂ Emission Differences Among China's Transport Sectors And Their Influencing Factors

With the vigorous development of social economy and the improvement of the people's life quality, the rapid enhancement of motorization, the increasing globalization of trade and the fast development of tourism promote transportation demand, transport energy consumption and carbon emissions in China to increase. China's transport industry has been a priority area for energy conservation and CO2 emission reduction due to its great carbon emissions nowadays. Especially in the circumstance of our country strongly advocating energy saving and emission reduction in key areas, the present situation of China's transport carbon emissions deserves attention. How to achieve carbon emission reduction in the transport has become a research hot topic.The main content of the paper includes the following aspects. First of all, based on the existing statistical data of 1980-2012, this study obtains the energy consumption of China's four transport sub-sectors (i.e., road, waterway, aviation and railway,). On this basis, this research adopts top-down method to estimate their carbon dioxide emissions. Subsequently, this paper applies the ?-convergence and P-convergence methods to investigate the CO2 emission disparities among China's four transport sub-sectors. Eventually, the paper extends the Kaya identity, and introduces the influencing factors called economic growth, industrialization, converted turnover per value added of industry, transport energy intensity and carbon dioxide intensity. Then with the logarithmic mean Divisia index (LMDI) method, it decomposes these factors for CO2 emissions in China's four transport sub-sectors to determine the influence degree, respectively.The results are listed as follows. Firstly, CO2 emissions of road, waterway, aviation and railway in China are on the rise. Among them, road and waterway are the principal sources for transport carbon emissions, and the road sector is the relatively largest CO2 emitter. In 2012, the CO2 emissions of road, waterway, aviation and railway accounted for 65.21%,29.07%,3.61%and 2.11%of the total, respectively. Secondly, CO2 emission differences among China's transport sectors gradually narrowed during the period 1980-1996, while gradually enlarged during 1996-2012. Thirdly, the economic growth acted as one of the most significant factors driving China's transport CO2 emission growth over the period 1980-2012. In this period, the CO2 emissions of road, waterway, aviation and railway increased by 561.71 Mt, 265.27 Mt,54.07 Mt and 28.28 Mt, respectively. Fourthly, the industrialization level is one of the main factors affecting the growth of carbon emissions in China's four transport sub-sectors concerned, whereas the carbon dioxide intensity has little influence on the carbon emission variations of China's transport sub-sectors; the transport energy intensity is an important factor to curb the increment of carbon emissions in China's road, aviation and railway, while it is a chief factor influencing on an increase in waterway carbon emissions.