An analysis of the driving factors of energy-related CO₂ emission reduction in China from 2005 to 2013

The identification of the driving factors of China's energy-related emissions in the past years is very important to inform the policy design for China's future emission mitigations. Although this topic has been widely discussed in the literature, this paper provides the most recent overall estimation of the emission mitigation factors from both the production side and the consumption side taking into account China's recent energy and economic transformation. This study adopts China's most recent revised energy and economic data from 2005 to 2013 and analyzes it with a logarithmic mean Divisia index (LMDI) decomposition model. We find that the primary emission mitigation contributor is the improvement of energy productivity in the industry sectors, which contributes 72% of the total reduction; household contributes 8.3%. The economic transitions in 2013 are still in an early stage, and the expected economic structure effect is moderately on emission reduction. In the future, China needs to improve the energy productivity in production sectors further by both enforcing energy conservation and promoting industry upgrading. Economic restructure will play a more important role in future emission reduction.