Whether China's industrial sectors make efforts to reduce CO2 emissions from production? - A decomposed decoupling analysis

Growing environmental pressure urges China to develop in a sustainable and low carbon way. We applied the Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index (LMDI) method and Tapio index to analyze the decoupling elasticity and effort index of industrial growth and CO2 emissions in China from 1996 to 2015. We found that the industry-related CO2 emissions in China expanded by around 1.5 times during the study period, of which the manufacture sector contributed most, followed by transportation sector. The manufacture sector witnessed a reverse U tendency of decoupling progress, moving from strong decoupling to weak decoupling, and turned back to strong decoupling. Expansive coupling and strong negative decoupling appeared in construction, transportation and commercial sectors over certain sub-periods. The great energy and heavy industry provinces were capable of achieving strong decoupling, while the less energy consumers witnessed a clear tendency towards coupling. Although energy intensity contributed most to the reduction in the total CO2 emissions of the whole country, this mitigation effect cannot be observed for all regions in the four sub-periods, indicating that the energy technology and efficiency had large disparities among provinces in China. Overall, our analysis is able to provide effective reference for regional low-carbon transition.