Analysis Of Carbon Emissions From Residential Consumption In China

Global warming has become a major environmental and ecological problem faced by countries around the world,and green and low-carbon development is the general trend.In the past decades,China’s residential consumption has grown rapidly.Resident consumption is increasingly becoming an important driver of carbon emissions in China.With the deepening of global integration and the development of international trade,the demand for products and services by a country’s residents often requires both domestic and international markets to be satisfied.Therefore,the consumption activities of Chinese residents affect both domestic energy consumption and carbon emissions,as well as the energy consumption and carbon emissions of other countries through international trade.In order to achieve green sustainable consumption and reduce the burden of China’s consumption on the environment,it is necessary to study the environmental impacts caused by China’s residential consumption from a global perspective.Therefore,based on a global perspective,this paper estimates the domestic and foreign carbon emissions caused by China’s residential consumption under the conditions of an open economy,discusses the important factors affecting the total carbon emissions and imported carbon emissions from residential consumption,and conducts a comparative analysis and simulation analysis with the characteristics of carbon emissions from residential consumption in representative countries,in the hope of formulating effective consumption emission reduction measures for China to achieve low-carbon consumption and we hope to provide useful policy inspirations for formulating effective consumption reduction measures and promoting the construction of ecological civilization in China.This paper mainly focuses on three parts:the measurement of CO₂ emissions from Chinese residents’consumption based on the GMRIO model,the decomposition analysis of influencing factors of residents’CO₂ emissions,and the comparative analysis of residents’CO₂ emissions in China,the United States,and Japan,and the research framework of this paper is constructed.First,based on the input-output table of the World Input-Output Database（WIOD）from 2001 to 2014,this paper uses the environmental input-output method to estimate the domestic and foreign carbon emissions caused by the consumption of Chinese residents and analyses them from the perspectives of time trends,country distribution and sectoral structure.The research results show that the carbon emissions of Chinese residents’consumption continued to rise during the study period,but the domestic production sector is still the main bearer of carbon emissions,and the proportion of imported carbon emissions has always been at a low level;from a sectoral point of view,the share of carbon emissions from food and services has increased significantly;from the perspective of final demand,replacing investment with household consumption to drive economic growth is an effective way to reduce carbon emissions in China.Secondly,the structural decomposition analysis of carbon emissions and import carbon emissions caused by household consumption found that the reduction of carbon emission intensity of the production sector is the primary inhibitory factor for the carbon emissions of household consumption in China,while the expansion of the scale of household consumption is the main driver of the growth of carbon emissions from consumption.Thirdly,the simulation analysis of household consumption carbon emissions found that when China’s household consumption structure tends to be closer to that of the United States and Japan,it can effectively reduce carbon emissions;when China’s sectoral production technology approaches Japan,it can also significantly reduce household consumption carbon emissions.Finally,based on the results of the empirical analysis,this paper puts forward relevant policy recommendations to promote low-carbon consumption in China in the future in terms of guiding residents’green consumption,differentiating different industries to reduce emissions,optimising the structure of inputs and outputs,improving the efficiency of the use of intermediate goods,improving energy utilisation and optimising the layout of international trade.