Carbon mitigation for industrial sectors in the Jing-Jin-Ji urban agglomeration, China

Abstract

Industrial companies are responsible for most of the energy consumption and carbon emissions in China's urban agglomerations. Some scholars have allocated CO2 emissions to China's industrial sectors in reaching national reduction targets, yet industrial sectors' burden-sharing problem for carbon mitigation at the provincial level has not been well addressed. Given the goal of realizing China's national carbon mitigation target by 2030, we applied a nonlinear quota allocation model to obtain the optimal allocation of emission reduction quotas among 37 industrial sectors in the Jing-Jin-Ji urban agglomeration in China (comprising Beijing, Tianjin, and Hebei). Compared to Beijing and Tianjin, the secondary industry in Hebei bears the highest reduction responsibilities, given that Hebei will experience the largest carbon emissions, at 0.42 billion tons in 2030, which is 80.04% of the total emissions in the Jing-Jin-Ji urban agglomeration. Energy production and heavy manufacturing sectors serve as the major carbon emitters and have relatively high carbon intensities, which indicates that they have significant potential and major responsibilities for impacting carbon mitigation. Based on differences in urban function and development mode, the same industrial sectors in the three provinces have different obligations for emission reductions. This study is vital to allocate reduction responsibilities among industrial sectors and to discrete key sector categories bearing a higher mitigation burden.