Regional Carbon Allocation Considering Embodied Carbon Emissions

The Chinese government has made it clear that China will reduce the carbon dioxide emission per unit GDP by 40%-45% in 2020.How to assign the responsibility of carbon emission reduction justly and reasonably is the key problem of realize emission reduction tasks.While,current allocations just focus on direct carbon emissions and neglect a number of embodied carbon emissions and carbon transfer emissions caused by regional trade,which affecting the fairness of the allocation of responsibility for carbon reduction.Therefore,based on the review of researches on carbon transfer and carbon distribution at home and abroad,this paper first calculates the embodied carbon emissions and analyses carbon transfer characteristics in China,then learn the influencing factors of the change of embodied carbon emissions,finally allocate carbon emissions at the provincial level and predict the CO2 emission in each province for achieving the carbon emission reduction target in 2020.The empirical results show that:(1)China’s domestic trade embodied carbon emission increased a lot,and the emission transfer amount experienced an expansion trend.The embodied carbon emission mainly transferred from the developed regions to the developing regions,which confirmed the “pollution paradise hypothesis’ ’ in China.China’s carbon transfer is mainly concentrated in carbon-intensive manufacturing and the central and western regions of China are more likely to export high-emission industries such as export mining,process manufacturing and construction.(2)Although the improvement of production technology significantly suppressed the growth of embodied carbon emissions,the scale effect completely offset the technological effect and the structural effect on the embodied carbon emissions was not significant.The regions connected the developed and developing regions usually have more significant scale effect and structural effect,especially in the carbon-intensive manufacturing sectors.(3)China’s provinces are significantly different in emission performances.If we ignore the influence of embodied carbon emissions,the emission performance of most developed provinces will be overestimated,and the developing provinces will be underestimated.The developed provinces with greater pressure on carbon reduction should focus on reducing the intensity of carbon emissions.The developing provinces of technical inefficiency should first develop the local economy and then reduce carbon emission intensity.