Study on the Initial Carbon Quota Allocation Scheme of Provincial Regions in China from the Perspective of Responsibility and Goal, Fairness and Efficiency

China's commitment to identifying national carbon reduction targets is an essential topic. This study focuses on carbon quota allocation in China's unified carbon market under the principles of both equity and efficiency. First, we develop a carbon Gini coefficient to reflect the allocation equity and an emission abatement cost function to measure efficiency, respectively, which we further introduce as objectives into a multi-objective nonlinear programming model to obtain the optimal allocation. Second, we determine the optimal weights for the indicators constituting the comprehensive index, avoiding subjectivity in weight setting. Third, we calculate the provincial carbon intensity reduction burdens as well as the optimal carbon emission quos for 30 provinces in China, which has significant policy implications for the establishment of a unified national carbon market. Based on our results, we make four policy recommendations related to the construction of the national unified market. Our research not only contributes to the progress of existing literature on the methodology of regional allocation of carbon quotas, but also has a special interest for policy makers