Study On Embodied Carbon Of Chinese Foreign Trade Under The Background Of Climate Change

As economy grows, climate change and its environmental problem are increasingly serious. How to reduce the carbon emissions in the international trade has become the focus of world attention. China, as the world’s largest energy consumer and carbon emitters, is under enormous pressure to reduce emissions. Foreign trade in China is rapidly developing since reform and opening up policy. And our country’s development of foreign trade is based on large energy consumption and the expense of environment and resources, it created huge economic benefits while produced large amounts of carbon dioxide, which leaded to global warming. Therefore, this paper discusses our country’s foreign trade implicit carbon emissions and focuses on the import and export trade in the industry of relatively high carbon emissions. It is good to adjust and optimize the structure of foreign trade and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, redefine our country’s international carbon emissions responsibility and ease international pressure of reduce emissions.First, this paper applies input-output model to measure the embodied carbon emissions of the main industrial products import and export trade in our country during2002-2011. The empirical results show that, during this period, China’s import and export trade embodied carbon content showed a trend of fluctuations in growth. At the same time, carbon deficit of our country’s industry import and export trade exits and the net exports embodied carbon is on the rise. In addition, the embodied carbon of trade is huge and turning to a phenomenon of gathering. Embodied carbon in manufacturing of machinery equipment industry accounted for the highest. Secondly, by using structural decomposition analysis model, this paper classifies the factors affecting the import and export of China’s major industrial carbon decomposition into three aspects, scale, structure and technical effects. Then to explore the main reason for the increase in embodied carbon emissions of our country’s foreign trade. Results show that the embodied carbon of import and export trade increase or decrease due to size, structure and technology effect. The technical effect plays a role on emission reduction while the structure effect is both positive and negative. But the emission reduction effect brought by technology and structural effects is far less than the carbon emission growth caused by scale effect. Therefore, with the continuous expansion of China’s foreign trade, embodied carbon emissions will be more. Finally, we can get conclusions and put forward corresponding policy suggestions by empirical research to provide reference opinions for future energy conservation and emissions reduction measures.