Economic drivers of greenhouse gas emissions in China

For China, greenhouse gas emissions increased by 0.075 gigatons (Gt) in the period of 1995-2000 and increased by 4.23 Gt from 2000 to 2009, then reached the amount of 8.61 Gt in 2009. Different from the traditional analysis focused on accounting sectors' greenhouse gas emissions under the production-based responsibility, this paper investigates sectoral GHG emissions in China in the period of 1995-2009 from the perspective of consumption-based and income-based responsibility. We found that different metrics yield very different GHG emission responsibilities. The sector of electricity, gas and water supply has the highest GHG emissions responsibility based on the production and income metrics, while the sector of construction is the largest emitter under the consumption metric. In the light of the key driver analysis of GHG emissions from 1995 to 2009, based on the consumption metric, the change in the final demand volume is the largest driver of increase in China's consumption-based GHG emissions (+17.18 Gt). The changes in the production structure and the final demand structure are other contributors (+0.53 Gt, +1.46 Gt). The improvement to the intensity of GHG emissions is the main force for GHG emissions mitigation (−14.86 Gt). According to the income metric, the contributions of input volume changes, input structure changes and GHG intensity changes are similar to the effects of consumption-based responsibility (+19.11  Gt, +1.13 Gt, −14.95 Gt). The difference is that the change in the production structure is another force that offset GHG increase (−0.98 Gt). Results in this paper can give some recommendation on mitigating GHG emissions in China for policy-makers from production-side, demand-side and supply-side.