Research On Carbon Carrying Capacity Assessment In Chongqing

With the rapid growth of the world's population and the rapid expansion of the economic scale, global warming has becoming a serious problem increasingly, and natural environment and social problems arising from global warming have posed a grave threat to the human survival and development. Greenhouse gases represented by carbon dioxide is the main cause of global warming. China, as the world's largest developing country and the largest carbon dioxide-emitting country, is facing the dual pressure from economic development and energy conservation. As one of the six old industrial bases in China, and also China's first low carbon urban pilot and carbon emissions trading pilot, Chongqing is also facing the pressure of maintaining economic and social development and reducing energy conservation and emissionsIn this paper, the author takes the carbon carrying capacity as the research object, combines with the carrying capacity research with the carbon emission research, starts from existing research to re-define the carbon carrying capacity, explains the connotation of the carbon carrying capacity, evaluates the carbon balance and the comprehensive carbon carrying capacity of Chongqing to make an empirical analysis of the carbon carrying capacity of Chongqing, and puts forward strategies for improving the carbon carrying capacity to deal with the carbon carrying capacity overload of Chongqing. In this paper, following conclusions are drawn. This paper' main conclusions are as follows:(1) The carbon carrying capacity is defined as “the threshold value of support to carbon cycling activities of the dualistic society(natural-economic society) from human economic and social activities in a particular ecosystem in a period of time”. It is believed that the carbon carrying capacity is composed of two parts: carbon pressure and carbon support. The carbon carrying capacity threshold is set to 0 or 1, and the evaluation of the carbon carrying capacity is divided into two steps. The carbon balance(subtracting the carbon emission and carbon storage) is analyzed to measure factors which produce a direct impact on the carbon bearing capacity; social, environmental, economic and other factors, which produce a direct or indirect impact on the carbon carrying capacity, are considered to make a comprehensive evaluation of the carbon carrying capacity.(2) A preliminary investigation is made of the carbon carrying capacity of Chongqing from 1998 to 2013, to analyze and evaluate the variation trend of its carbon balance. Analytical and evaluation results show that Chongqing suffered a serious imbalance in its carbon emission and storage from 1998 to 2013, and showed an overloaded carbon carrying capacity.(3) The DPSIR model is used to build an integrated carbon carrying capacity model. On this basis, an integrated carbon carrying capacity evaluation index system, which covers four layers including the target, system layer, field layer and index layer and four carrying capacity subsystems in resource, environment, society and economy, is established. A computational formula for the integrated carbon carrying capacity model is defined, to dictate that the threshold of the carbon carrying capacity of Chongqing is 1, which is the same with the threshold setting of the integrated carbon carrying capacity.(4) An empirical study is made of the integrated carbon carrying capacity of Chongqing from 1998 to 2013. Study results show that Chongqing had improved its carbon carrying capacity from 1998 to 2013, but its carbon carrying capacity was still overloaded. Strategies should be developed from four aspects including resources, environment, economy and society, in order to further improve the carbon carrying capacity of Chongqing.