Regional allocation of CO2 emissions allowance over provinces in China by 2020

The mitigation efforts of China are increasingly important for meeting global climate target since the rapid economic growth of China has led to an increasing share in the world's total CO2 emissions, and nowadays, China has become the world's largest CO2 emitter. This paper sets out to explore the approach for realizing China's national mitigation targets submitted to UNFCCC as part of the Copenhagen Accord and the Canc'n Agreements; that is, to reduce the intensity of CO2 emissions per unit of GDP by 40-45% by 2020, as well as reducing the energy intensity and increasing the share of non-fossil fuel in primary energy consumption, through a study of regional allocation of CO2 emissions allowance over China's provinces. This paper first argues that the realization of the mitigation targets of China to reduce emission intensity and energy intensity essentially represent a total amount of CO2 emissions allowance allocation and energy consumption control problem, and a multi-objective optimization method will be more appropriate to solve this problem. Then an improved zero sum gains data envelopment analysis (ZSG-DEA) optimization model is proposed, which could simultaneously deal with the constant total amount of CO2 emission allowance allocation and energy consumption reassignment through the efficiency measure, iterative computation, and input variable adjustment process. In addition, several scenarios of China's regional economic and social development, CO2 emissions, and energy consumption by 2020 under the Chinese mitigation action plans are presented. Based on these scenarios and through the implementation of the allocation model, a new efficient CO2 emissions allowance allocation scheme on a provincial level for China's 30 regions is proposed, in which five provinces of Ningxia, Inner Mongolia, and Shanxi etc. have to shoulder heavier mitigation burden in terms of emission intensity and energy intensity reductions, and the burdens on other five provinces of Anhui, Jiangxi, and Jiangsu etc. are comparatively lighter. Furthermore, the remaining 20 Chinese provinces all take mediumly ranked emission intensity and energy intensity reduction burdens.