Revising China’s energy consumption and carbon emissions

Abstract:

China is the world’s largest carbon emitter and takes the lion’s share of new increased emission since 2000, China’s carbon emissions and mitigation efforts have received global attentions (Liu et al., Nature 500, 143-145)¹. Yet China’s emission estimates have been approved to be greatly uncertain (Guan et al., Nature Climate Change 2, 672–675)². Accurate estimation becomes even crucial as China has recently pledged to reach a carbon emission peak by 2030, but no quantitative target has been given, nor is it even possible to assess without a reasonable baseline.

Here we produced new estimates of Chinese carbon emissions for 1950-2012 based on a new investigation in energy consumption activities and emission factors using extensively surveyed and experimental data from 4243 mines and 602 coal samples. We reported that the total energy consumption is 10% higher than the nationally published value. The investigated emission factors used in China are significantly (40%) different from the IPCC default values which were used in drawing up several previous emission inventories. The final calculated total carbon emissions from China are 10% different than the amount reported by international data sets. The new estimate provides a revision of 4% of global emissions, which could have important implications for global carbon budgets and burden-sharing of climate change mitigation.

1 Liu, Z. et al. A low-carbon road map for China. Nature 500, 143-145 (2013).

2 Guan, D., Liu, Z., Geng, Y., Lindner, S. & Hubacek, K. The gigatonne gap in China's carbon dioxide inventories. Nature Climate Change, 672–675 (2012).