Exploration And Development Of China’s Emission Reduction Undertaking

With the significant increase in human productivity,the consumption of large amounts of fossil fuels has caused serious damage to the environment in which human beings live and develop,and the greenhouse gases released by burning fossil fuels are triggering an ecological crisis on a global scale.In view of this,countries around the world have acted to continuously strengthen the governance and improvement of climate and environment,and actively promote emission reduction actions.China has demonstrated its role as a responsible power and has made positive and fruitful efforts.The whole nation aspires and expects to adhere to green low-carbon development and build a beautiful China,which is also an important part of realizing the Chinese dream of great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.Since the 11th Five-Year Plan,China has developed a series of comprehensive strategies and planning systems oriented toward low-carbon emission reduction,and in 2013,the National Development and Reform Commission(NDRC)began piloting market-based carbon trading in seven provinces and cities,including Beijing,Shanghai,Tianjin,Chongqing,Hubei,Guangdong,and Shenzhen,which is the largest practical application of market-based emission reduction policy tools in China.This paper treats these pilot policies as a quasi-natural experiment,provides a comprehensive assessment of the emission reductions in the seven carbon trading pilot regions,and verifies their potential transmission mechanisms from the perspective of foreign trade,providing a theoretical basis and an empirical test for the further promotion and improvement of China’s carbon emissions trading policy.The contributions of this paper through empirical analysis are twofold as follows.First,a double difference(DID)model is constructed to test the effectiveness of carbon emissions trading policy as a whole,and the robustness of the model is confirmed after parallel trend test,multiple cointegration test and placebo test,thus improving the credibility of the regression results.Second,based on the premise that the carbon emissions trading policy is effective,this paper focuses on the relationship between foreign trade development and carbon dioxide emissions.After theoretically exploring the possibility that trade openness affects the carbon emissions trading policy,a mediating effects model is chosen to analyze the mechanism of how the carbon emissions trading policy works in China.The regression results of the DID model also indicate that the carbon emissions trading market has a significant carbon emission reduction effect on the carbon emissions of the pilot cities,and this finding is based on controlling for the city-level This finding still holds after controlling for city-level factors and carbon emission-related factors.Second,the mediating effect analysis shows that CO2 emissions increase significantly with the increase of trade openness,and thus the development of China’s foreign trade has caused some damage to the ecological environment.At the same time,trade openness,as a mediating variable,plays an important role as a transmission mechanism in the process of carbon emissions trading policy affecting CO2 emissions.Thirdly,this paper further explores the difference of trade openness in the structure of import and export,so the regressions are conducted with import and export as a share of regional GDP as mediating variables respectively,and the study finds that the mediating effect of import trade is more obvious compared to export trade.