Policy Modeling For China's CO₂ Emissions Reduction And Its Empirical Analysis

Global climate change is hitherto the most serious environmental problem, and is also one of the most complicated challenges in the 21st century. The international negotiations aiming to mitigate global climate warming not only related to the people's surviving, but also influence directly the modernization and sustainable development of developing countries. Now the scientific community has reached a consensus that people's activities should be responsible for the part of global climate warming at least, and international negotiations have been also underway to try to reach a consensus on cutting the CO₂ emissions worldwide in order to solve it at all. As the largest developing country and the second largest CO₂ emissions source next to the US, China's CO₂ emissions reductions have been one of the hottest problems discussed by academe, environmental administers and all governments in the world. It is of great importance to analyze China's CO₂ emissions, which is beneficial to China's sustainable development, but also can contribute to mitigate the global climate warming.Therefore, this paper quantifies what potential exits in mitigating the growth of China's CO₂ emissions, and what impacts possible different abatement policies will have on economy in the future based on some models and approaches. Our main innovations are as follows:(1) What factors can have some impacts on the growth of CO₂ emissions? And what factors are definitively driving the growth of CO₂ change? Both questions are necessary base to establish carbon emissions reduction strategies and abatement policies, and even mitigate the growth of CO₂ emissions or cut CO₂ emissions for decision-makers. Based on STIRPAT model, this paper quantifies the impacts of population, affluence and technology on the total CO₂ emissions at the high income level, upper-middle income level, lower-middle income level, low income level, the world and China over the period 1975-2000. Our main results show that the impact of population on CO₂ emissions is great, especially the proportion of the population between ages 15 and 64. It has a negative impact on the total CO₂ emissions of countries at the high income level, but the impact is positive at other income levels.