China’s pathways to peak carbon emissions: New insights from various industrial sectors

To maintain global warming below 2 °C, as per the Paris Agreement, China should stop its energy-related carbon emissions from increasing by 2030. Given the dominating role of industrial-specific emissions in the national emissions inventory, exploring the potential peaking pathways of emissions in China’s diverse industrial sectors is necessary. By accounting for the emissions from China’s eight sectors over the past 23 years, this study examines the Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis for the eight sectors using both regression analysis and Monte Carlo simulation. We found that seven out of the eight sectors are expected to reach their peak emissions before 2040, despite continued economic growth. Specifically, emissions from the Agriculture, Building, Manufacturing, Others, and Transportation sectors are highly likely to peak before 2030, while those from the Electricity and Mining sectors may peak after 2030. Our findings, which provide a deeper understanding of China’s potential peaking pathways at the sectoral level, can serve as a reference for other countries that are facing similar difficulties in identifying the appropriate ways of peaking sectoral emissions; this is currently a neglected field of analysis in many Nationally Determined Contributions.