An Empirical Study On The Affecting Factors On The Carbon Emissions From China’s Airlines

In recent years, global warming caused by greenhouse gases has attracted increasingattention, which brings great pressure on the civil aviation transportation industry of ourcountry, so implementing energy-saving and emission reduction is the inevitable choice ofcivil aviation. In order to achieve energy-saving and emission-reduction, finding out theinfluencing factors on carbon emissions from airlines and analyzing the influence degree ofeach factor are the tasks that need to be done firstly.In the beginning, according to the deformation on Kaya identity based on the productioncharacteristics of air transportation, the influence factors of carbon emission from airlines ofour country are presented, which include carbon emission coefficient, energy-savingtechnology, aircraft movements, route structure and economic growth, and then taking thecarbon emission coefficient as a constant and airlines’carbon dioxide emissions of unit outputas the explained variable, this paper uses the2000-2011year data of eight large-medium-sizedAirlines to set up panel data model to make an empirical analysis on the remaining factors.The conclusions include: in the long term, route structure, economic growth, energy-savingtechnology, aircraft movements have great striking impact on carbon dioxide emissions ofunit output of our country’s airlines, and their influence degrees are decreasing; in the shortterm, the energy-saving technology and route structure still have significant influence oncarbon dioxide emissions of unit output of our country’s airlines, while the impacts ofeconomic growth and aircraft movements are not significant; For driving directions, bothoptimizing route structure and improving energy-saving technology have reverse inhibition oncarbon dioxide emissions of unit output of airlines no matter in the long-term and short-term,while economic growth and reducing aircraft movements with a reverse inhibition only in thelong term. Subsequently, Kuznets curve (KC) model and state space model are used to verifywhether the carbon dioxide emissions from China Airlines follow the environmental Kuznetscurve (EKC) hypothesis, the results of verification include: there is a positive relationshipbetween China’s Airlines carbon dioxide emissions and economic growth, which do notfollow the EKC hypothesis; due to the impact of macroeconomic environment, civil aviationindustry regulation policies and other factors, the influence coefficient of economic growth onairlines’ carbon dioxide emissions appears the change trend of inverted N type. Finally, for therealization of energy-saving and emission-reduction targets in civil aviation transportationindustry, according to the above discussed factors, this article put forward four proposals:speeding up the socio-economic development, strengthening the R&D investment andapplication of energy-saving technologies, optimizing route structure, controlling aircraftmovements.