A number of previous studies on China's carbon emissions have mainly focused on two facts: (1) the continuous growth in emissions up till the middle of the 1990s; (2) the recent stability of emissions from 1996 to 2001. Decomposition analysis has been widely used to explore the driving forces behind these phenomena. However, since 2002, China's carbon emissions have resumed their growth at an even greater rate. This paper investigates China's carbon emissions during 1971–2003, with particular focus on the role of biomass, and the fall and resurgence in emissions since the mid-1990s. We use an extended Kaya identity and the well-established logarithmic mean Divisia index (LMDI I) method. Carbon emissions are decomposed into effects of various driving forces. We find that (1) a shift from biomass to commercial energy increases carbon emissions by a magnitude comparable to that of the increase in emissions due to population growth, (2) the technological effect and scale effect due to per-capita gross domestic products (GDP) growth are different in the pre-reform period versus the post-reform period, (3) the positive effect of population growth has been decreasing over the entire period, and (4) the fall in emissions in the late 1990s and resurgence in the early 2000s may be overstated due to inaccurate statistics
In 2002, Harvard's China Project predicted that China would surpass the United States in annual emissions of carbon dioxide within a decade and, in a few decades, in total cumulative emissions of carbon dioxide since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (Shaw, 2002). According to data from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center(CDIAC) (CDIAC, 2006), China is the second largest emitter after the United States, with 13.7% of global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions. EIA (2006) predicted that between now and the year 2030 the country with the largest increase in carbon dioxide emissions would be China. More recently, on June 19, 2007, the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (NEAA) announced that China's 2006 CO2 emissions surpassed those of the US, which is so far the first study showing that China has become the world's largest carbon emitter. Given the increasing significance and extensive attention from the international community, China's carbon emissions have become a focal subject for many empirical studies that explore the driving forces behind their long-run growth and short-run variations (Ang and Pandiyan, 1997; Zhang, 2000a, Zhang, 2000b; Dhakal et al., 2003; Wu et al., 2005; Wang et al., 2005; Lee and Wankeun, 2006; Wu et al., 2006). Various economic, technological, legislative, and social factors have been identified by previous studies as the driving forces behind China's energy-related CO2 emissions. Most of these studies focus on two facts about China's carbon emissions: (1) the continuous growth in emissions until the mid-1990s; (2) the stagnancy in emissions in the late 1990s. However, after 2002 both the data used in current study and subsequently in other reports (such as the NEAA report) show that emissions have resumed their growth at an even higher speed than before (Fig. 1, Fig. 2)..
By far the largest source of CO2 emissions is fossil fuel combustion, which accounts for three quarters of anthropogenic CO2 emissions in China (Streets et al., 2001). China is one of the most coal-dependent major economies in the world (Fig. 3). During the period of 1971–2003, coal consumption accounted for 66–79% of annual total commercial energy consumption and 45–60% of annual total primary energy consumption (commercial plus biomass) (IEA, 2005). Coal is notorious for many environmental as well as health issues, among which carbon emissions become one of the pressing concerns. During the same period, about 66–84% of total energy-related carbon emissions in China came from coal burning (CDIAC, 2006). China's heavy dependence on coal burning should, therefore, serve as the starting point for all analyses of China's carbon emissions and policy recommendations for their control.
Although fossil fuels assume the majority share of China's fuel combustion, as a developing country, China still consumes a significant amount of biomass. The absolute level of biomass consumption has increased little over the years, and its share of total primary energy consumption has decreased (Fig. 4, Fig. 5). Biomass consumption is usually excluded from total energy consumption in studies of China's carbon emissions. This is as they are accounted for when computing emissions due to land use and also including them in emissions from fuel use would result in double-counting.1 However, the IPCC (1997, pp. 1.3–1.22) includes biomass in estimating national greenhouse gas inventories. Emissions from biomass may not be counted as a net emission; however, as one of the major fuel types in developing countries, a significant change in its share of total fuel consumption will have a net impact on total emissions. None of the above-mentioned studies has investigated the role of biomass fuel in China's carbon emissions.
This study investigates China's carbon emissions from 1971 to 2003. In addition to the issues investigated in previous research, this paper provides a first look at the impact of the shift in fuel mix from biomass to commercial energy. Additionally, policy analysis is conducted based on China's heavy coal dependence. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 briefly reviews related literature and previous studies on China's carbon emissions. Section 3 describes the method, followed by a description of data. Section 5conducts the decomposition and presents the results. Section 6 provides discussions of the policy implications and limits of the results. Some conclusion remarks are provided in the last section.
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