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Net primary productivity‐based factors of China's carbon intensity: A regional perspective
Author(s) -
Chen Jiandong,
Xu Chong,
Xie Qianjiao,
Song Malin
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
growth and change
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.657
H-Index - 55
eISSN - 1468-2257
pISSN - 0017-4815
DOI - 10.1111/grow.12423
Subject(s) - primary production , china , productivity , climate change , carbon fibers , carbon footprint , environmental science , geography , physical geography , natural resource economics , frontier , baseline (sea) , greenhouse gas , ecosystem , ecology , economics , economic growth , mathematics , oceanography , archaeology , algorithm , geology , composite number , biology
Reducing carbon intensity (CI) is one of the core steps of climate change mitigation. This study emphasized the roles of ecological services and regional heterogeneity in determining CI. We considered heterogeneities based on geography and income and explored the roles of net primary productivity (NPP)‐based carbon footprint and CI in the changes in China's CI over 2001−2015 using an extended production‐theoretical decomposition analysis and matching the socio‐economic data sets with NPP data from a remote sensing satellite. We found that group technological change, reflecting the effect of shrinkage or expansion of the group best practice frontier, and the potential NPP‐based carbon footprint, reflecting the impact of energy‐related CO 2 emissions on ecological carbon absorption, are the most significant factors accounting for the increase and decrease in CI, respectively, while NPP‐based CI generally accounts for the decline in CI. We further showed that the technology gap change exhibited by an invert U‐shaped curve contributed to the increase in CI under geography‐based heterogeneity. We advise that China's policies should be more focused on ecological factors and regional heterogeneity in regions with abundant NPP (e.g., Yunnan and Sichuan) to further reduce CI.