Net primary productivity‐based factors of China's carbon intensity: A regional perspective

Jiandong Chen, Chong Xu, Qianjiao Xie and Malin Song

Growth and Change, 2020, vol. 51, issue 4, 1727-1748

Abstract: 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 CO2 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.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/grow.12423

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:growch:v:51:y:2020:i:4:p:1727-1748

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0017-4815

Access Statistics for this article

Growth and Change is currently edited by Dan Rickman and Barney Warf

More articles in Growth and Change from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().