This paper introduces a comprehensive Climate-gOvernance Modeling u0026amp; Policy ASsessment System (COMPASS) developed by the School of Ecology u0026amp; Environment, Renmin University of China. The COMPASS includes a topu2212down computable general equilibrium model (CE3-CGE), a bottomu2212up energy technology model (PECE), a localized integrated assessment model (GCAM-CHN), as well as econometric and machine learning approaches. Together, these models simulate multi-scale interactions across energy systems, technological details, and macroeconomic dynamics, supporting policy analysis ranging from macrostructural trends to micro-level technoeconomic features, and from long-term pathways to short-term fluctuations. The COMPASS could provide robust scientific support for Chinau2019s carbon neutrality governance and contribute methodological advances and scenario-based insights to the broader field of global climate policy research.

The mismatch between CO2 emission and economic benefit transfer embodied in China's interprovincial trade led to carbon inequity. While existing literature has investigated the phenomenon, its sectoral drivers and underlying mechanisms remained underexplored. To address this gap, this study developed a carbon inequity index, assessed provincial carbon inequity from 2012 to 2017, and classified provinces into four types: main beneficiary, inferior beneficiary, inferior victim, and main victim. The findings identified the electric and heat power, other manufacture, and service sectors as the primary drivers of carbon inequity. The root cause was their production-based carbon intensity difference. Decomposition analysis revealed that this difference was primarily driven by potential energy intensity gaps. Nationally, carbon inequity worsened, as carbon Gini coefficient increased from 0.255 to 0.321. In bilateral trade, beneficiary provinces gained economic advantages by principally exporting service and other manufacture products, while transferring electric and heat power related CO2 emission to victim provinces. These findings provided critical insights into the mechanisms of carbon inequity, guided the design of precise policies in China, and offered a valuable reference for other developing countries.

Effectively balancing carbon efficiency and carbon equity is vital for China's carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals; however, the relationship between them remains unclear. This study first reveals the coupling coordination mechanisms between carbon efficiency and carbon equity based on Chinese provincial data from 2012 to 2017. We demonstrated that the carbon efficiency and carbon equity exhibited a strong coupling coordination relation (CCR). Carbon efficiency significantly promoted carbon equity and was a major driver of the CCR. With every 1 unit increase in carbon efficiency, carbon equity and the CCR increased by 3.766 to 5.694 units and approximately 1-2 units, respectively, and the positive impact of carbon efficiency on the CCR was approximately 6 to 8 times that of carbon equity. Carbon efficiency, carbon equity, and the CCR worsened between 2012 and 2017, and the bottom 50% of them were mainly concentrated in central and western provinces with abundant natural resources and net inflow of embodied carbon emission. Additionally, we demonstrated that resource dependence hindered carbon efficiency, carbon equity, and the CCR, and the potential transmission pathways were the crowding-out effect on the technology innovation, digital informatization, and advancement of industrial structure.

The development and application of climate mitigation technology and environmental tax alleviating the pressure on energy transitions in OECD countries, but little effort has been made to clarify the role of climate mitigation technology and environmental tax in renewable energy consumption-economic growth. To fill this gap, this study uses panel data for 38 OECD countries over the period 2000-2020, and examines the nonlinear impact of renewable energy consumption, climate mitigation technology, environmental tax and economic growth by using a dynamic panel threshold model. Our investigation verifies the threshold effect of climate mitigation technology and environmental tax in the relationship between renewable energy consumption and economic growth. Our findings highlight the fact that, with the development of climate mitigation technology, renewable energy consumption has a significant positive impact on economic growth, and the impact coefficient is more significant in high-carbon areas. The threshold effect of renewable energy consumption on economic growth is larger in high-carbon regions than in low-carbon areas, using environmental taxes as the threshold variable. The results of this study are unique and our findings deepen the literature's understanding of the relationship between climate mitigation technology, environmental tax, renewable energy consumption, and economic growth.

China's exports of iron and steel, aluminum, and their products (ISAP) are significantly affected by the European Union (EU) Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). This study introduces a modeling framework coupling a global multi-regional input-output table and the integrated assessment model GCAM-China, both of which embed Chinese provinces, to dynamically assess provincial cost implications of CBAM for China's ISAP exports, considering China's upcoming 2035 Nationally Determined Contributions. By 2034, direct emissions from China's ISAP exports to the EU reach 5.4 MtCO2, with CBAM costs of €1,157 million. Including indirect power use raises exports to 7.4 MtCO2 and €1,572 million. Accounting for supply chain emissions yields 15.8 MtCO2 and €3,378 million. Over 65% of these costs fall on Hebei, Jiangsu, Shanxi, Liaoning, and Zhejiang. Ambitious 2035 mitigation could substantially reduce CBAM costs, with about 45% of incremental costs for accelerating electric arc furnace penetration potentially offset by avoided CBAM costs.

China proactively reshaped its freight system to combat air pollution from the transportation sector. This paper focuses on the "Shifting Freight from Truck to Rail" (SFTR) policy, and examines the environmental consequences of expanding railway transport system while curbing heavy trucks in road freight. Combine the high-frequency air pollution data with meteorology data, utilizing the augmented regression discontinuity in time-series (RDiT), we found that the implementation of SFTR led to a respective decrease of 13.9 %, 12.5 %, and 4.2 % in the concentrations of PM2.5, PM10, and NO2 in the Bohai Rim region. Our empirical findings withstand an alternative specification of generalized difference-in-differences (DiD) method and a series of robustness checks. Preliminary calculations indicate that the health and economic output benefits of SFTR in the Bohai Rim region amount to approximately $24.99 billion, with the cost of expanding freight railway infrastructure and firms' compliance cost totaling $4.05 billion.

Carbon emissions at the provincial level are mostly calculated based on production responsibility, which ignores the carbon emission accounting perspectives of consumption and income responsibility. However, scientific accounting of carbon emissions from multiple perspectives is crucial to equitably distribute the responsibilities for reducing emissions. This study utilises an input-output model for multi-regional carbon emissions to calculate carbon emissions from production-, consumption- and income-based perspectives for exploring the variability in the responsibilities for reducing emissions at the provincial level. The Tapio decoupling coefficient is used to analyse the relationship between carbon emissions and economic growth in key provinces, and the Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index (LMDI) model is used to determine the factors promoting or inhibiting the decoupling of carbon emissions under different responsibility perspectives. The results show that, firstly, the national carbon emissions illustrate the following trend: production-based emissions > income-based emissions > consumption-based emissions. Secondly, provinces in strong decoupling states are distributed in a northeast-southwest direction. Carbon emissions and decoupling situations differ among varying responsibility perspectives due to interprovincial transfers of carbon emissions. Thus, a compensation mechanism should be established to promote a fair and orderly peaking in each province. Lastly, carbon emission intensity is a factor promoting decoupling in all three perspectives. In the meantime, output scale, economic development and factor input are the major inhibiting factors for the decoupling of production-, consumption- and income-based emissions, respectively.

This study examines the impact of meeting China's Paris Climate Agreement commitment to reduce its emission intensity by 65 % below 2005 levels by 2030 through various policy instruments. We use a dynamic recursive computable general equilibrium model to simulate the economy-wide impacts of administrative mandates and carbon taxes using different revenue recycling schemes. China's GDP in 2030 would be approximately 1 % lower than the baseline if carbon emissions were constrained by mandates. The commitment's economic costs are lower than the carbon constraint case, regardless of revenue recycling. Economic costs are the lowest when carbon tax revenue is recycled to reduce taxes on capital or corporate income. Subsidizing solar and wind energy further reduces emissions, but at a higher economic cost with a GDP loss of about 0.53 %–0.58 % from the baseline. The results highlight the importance of proper design architecture to make carbon taxes more palatable to policymakers and taxpayers.

Climate change and the increase in extreme weather events have a significant impact on the production and operation of businesses. However, existing literature has not fully discussed how climate risks affect corporate responsibility and sustainable behavior. This study uses a sample of heavily polluting companies listed on China's A-share market from 2010 to 2020 to examine the causal relationship between the increase in extreme temparature events and company ESG performance. The results show that an increase in extreme high-temperature weather significantly improves company ESG performance. After conducting robustness tests by changing the lag years and merging temperature bins, our main conclusions remain valid. Our empirical results show that heavily polluting companies are sensitive to changes in high-temperature weather. They can perceive climate risks from extreme temperature events and strive to improve their responsible and sustainable business practices. This paper also discusses the heterogeneity behind this impact. In terms of external environmental, companies that receive more attention from analysts and industry research reports are more sensitive to extreme high temperatures and are more proactive in improving their sustainable business practices. In regions with stronger economic policy uncertainty, heavily polluting companies make less effort to improve their sustainable business practices due to the increase in extreme temperature. The impact of environmental regulation intensity on this relationship is not significant. In terms of executive characteristics, the education level and overseas education experience of senior executives do not have a significant impact on their perception of extreme temperature. In terms of green transformation efforts, we find that heavily polluting companies with more green transformation efforts have weaker perception abilities towards extreme temperature. This paper enriches the research on how climate risks affect corporate operations and provides empirical evidence for how companies can respond to climate change risks by improving their ESG performance.

Carbon equity is the balance between carbon reduction responsibilities and development rights. The review of carbon equity in China can help it achieve carbon neutrality targets and provide valuable insights to other emerging countries. This study aimed to systematically sort, classify, compare, and prospect the research dimensions and measure methods for carbon equity. The research dimensions were first classified into intergenerational, regional, trade, and income carbon equity by literature analysis. Intergenerational carbon equity explores the balance of carbon emission rights among generations using integrated assessment models (IAM). Regional carbon equity analyzes the socioeconomic effect of regional carbon emission rights allocation by IAM or regional differences under a specific allocation assumption by the Theil index. Trade carbon equity studies the relationship between carbon emissions and economic benefit transfer embodied in inter-regional trade, which is more suitable for calculating by methods with comparable results, such as the optimized regional environmental inequality index. Income carbon equity investigates the carbon footprint heterogeneity among income groups by the carbon Gini coefficient. This paper further discusses potential research directions for each dimension. Notably, all research dimensions did not consider promoted strategies for carbon equity, which should be a priority for future studies.

The iron and steel industry is a large emitter of CO2 globally. This is especially true for the iron and steel industries in China, Japan, and Korea due to their production volumes and the prevalence of carbon-based steel production. With few low-carbon and commercially available alternatives, the iron and steel industry is truly a hard-to-abate sector. Each of the countries of interest have committed to a net-zero future involving the mitigation of emissions from steel production. However, few studies have investigated the means by which to achieve decarbonization beyond the inclusion of price signalling policies (e.g., carbon tax or emission trading schemes). Here, we use E3ME-FTT:Steel to simulate technology diffusion in the ISI under several policy environments and we investigate the likely impacts on the wider economy. The results show that penalizing carbon intensive processes can incentivize a transition towards scrap recycling, but it is relatively unsuccessful in aiding the uptake of low carbon primary steelmaking. A combination of support and penalizing policies can achieve deep decarbonisation (>80% emission reduction compared with the baseline). Mitigating the emissions in the iron and steel industry can lead to economic benefits in terms of GDP (China: +0.8%; Japan: +1.3%; Korea: +0.1%), and employment (Japan: +0.7%; Korea: +0.3%) with China, where job losses in the coal sector would negate job gains elsewhere, as the exception.

The carbon tax, as one of the environmental regulation tools, is likely to promote technological progress, which is ignored in previous works when evaluating the economic impact of a carbon tax. This study uses the Generalized Method of Moment model to investigate the effect of an environmental tax on total factor productivity and energy efficiency, and takes the effects as approximations of the effects of carbon tax on technological progress into the computable general equilibrium model as well as considering technology diffusion, to analyze the dynamic impact of carbon tax on China's economy growth. A carbon tax policy negatively impacts GDP at the early stage, but technological progress would make GDP impacts “turn negative into positive” in the late stage. With a carbon tax rate of 100 Yuan/ton, the GDP impact becomes positive from the 4th year and rises to 0.3% in 2030. Not all industries can realize the output of “turning negative into positive,” only low-carbon-intensity industries can achieve a clean transition. Overall, this study discusses the dual effects of a carbon tax on technological progress and increasing fossil energy costs, which provides a new perspective for an in-depth discussion of a carbon tax.

Using 57 city-level panel data of Yellow River Economic Belt from 2004 to 2018, this paper investigates the effect of industrial restructuring and environmental regulation on dynamic change of green technology progress (GTP) by convergence models. Industrial restructuring is divided into rationalization and advancement industrial structure. Concretely,delta convergence results present that GTP values of different cities do not converge to steady state, but absolute beta convergence results show that GTP growth rate of different cities will reach to a certain steady-level. In addition, the estimation results verify the existence of GTP conditional beta convergence. Ration-alization industrial structure, advancement industrial structure, and environmental regulation respectively have significantly positive effect on GTP, but the positive effects of rationalization and advancement industrial structure reduce with the increase of environmental regulation. Moreover, fiscal revenue decentralization and fiscal expenditure decentralization are important transmission channels through which industrial restructuring and environmental regulation affect GTP.

碳税作为一种有效的碳减排政策手段,目前可以采取的计税依据主要分为以排放为依据和以燃料为依据两种方式,二者都是我国开征碳税可能的选择.利用中国多部门可计算一般均衡模型(CGE)来模拟碳税在排放端和燃料端的两种计税依据;同时,设置了高、低两种碳税税率,考虑了不同的税收收入返还措施,旨在分析不同计税依据下实施碳税政策对我国宏观经济、能源消费、碳减排、行业产出及进出口的影响.分析结果表明:以排放端或燃料端为计税依据的两种碳税征收方式各有优缺点,相比排放端而言,以燃料端作为计税依据征收碳税对煤炭消费的抑制作用以及碳减排效果更好,但其对宏观经济及产业发展的负面冲击也更大;将碳税收入等额返还用以减免个人所得税或企业所得税有利于降低碳税对经济增长的负面冲击.最后,基于研究结论提出了几点政策建议.

绿证交易机制是中国推动能源结构和电力结构转型升级的重要经济手段.该研究构建了具有电力部门细分特征的中国"能源-环境-经济"递推动态CGE模型,模拟了在可再生能源电力消纳保障机制框架下实行强制性绿证交易的经济影响.研究发现:强制性绿证交易能够替代电价补贴政策促进新能源电力行业的发展,但所能实现的碳减排效果有限,2030年相比基准情景最高仅可削减3.804％的全国碳排放总量.可再生能源电力消纳保障机制的约束目标将对绿证交易机制的运行效果产生直接影响,有针对性地提高风电消纳目标,可以有效促进风电行业发展,但存在扭曲绿证交易市场、降低资源配置效率的风险.提高新能源电力的消纳责任权重需要以牺牲一定的经济发展为代价,但整体来看模拟期内对经济造成的负面冲击幅度较小,各类政策情景下实际GDP下降率不超过0.8％.在保证绿证真实绿色属性的前提下,具有较高灵活性的代理模式绿证交易可以缓解风、光电力消纳目标对用电行业生产成本和GDP造成的压力,更具成本有效性.扩大绿证交易市场行业覆盖范围能够激发绿证交易市场活力,进一步缓解强制性新能源电力消纳目标对经济发展造成的不利影响,但所能实现的碳减排效果也相对较弱.基于上述结论,该研究提出相应政策建议:通过完善奖惩机制强化可再生能源电力消纳保障机制的强制约束效力,保障绿证交易机制的实施效果;在保证绿证真实绿色属性的前提下可以选择更为灵活的绿证交易模式;为风电消纳责任权重设定适当的下限,适当引导资金流向海上风电等新兴可再生电力行业,更有效地利用可再生能源资源.

China has pledged to peak its carbon dioxide emissions by 2030, and the provincial governments have a common but differentiated responsibility for cutting emissions, depending on their conditions. Requiring all provinces to peak CO2 production-based emissions by 2030 may harm some regional economies because of the different industrial divisions in each Chinese province. In addition to production-based accounting (PBA), the study on the peaking of carbon emissions on consumption-based accounting (CBA) is a beneficial supplement to the research of PBA to comprehensively understand the basic situation and possible future paths of carbon emissions in all provinces in China. This research uses scenario analysis and the Monte Carlo simulation to simulate the CO2 path of Chinese provinces on production- and consumption-based accounting, which is based on China's multiregional input-output (MRIO) table in 2017 from the Chinese Emissions Accounts and DataSets (CEADs). This study finds that the provincial peaking time of CBA is 4-5 years later than that of PBA on average. Carbon transfer is the source of the difference in carbon emissions between PBA and CBA in different regions. We suggest that the government should pay attention to PBA and CBA when formulating policies. The region where PBA CO2 emissions reach peaking first should pay attention to the situation of CBA CO2 emissions, and the region where CBA CO2 emissions peak first should pay attention to the decline of PBA CO2 intensity. Finally, the government should encourage some developed net carbon import regions to provide transfer assistance of capital, technology, and talents to their carbon import regions to promote the scientific, fair, and efficient peaking of carbon emissions in provinces and the whole country.

As one of the most important economic regions in China, the improvement of green total-factor productivity (GTFP) in Yangtze River economic belt has vital significance for economic transformation in China. Using 109 cities’ panel data from 2004 to 2018, slacks-based global data envelopment analysis was first applied to construct GTFP. On the basis, dynamic GMM and mediation effect models were used to investigate the role of internet development on GTFP. The empirical results illustrated that GTFP lacked endogenous driving force. However, internet development not only has significant direct positive effect on GTFP, but also indirectly promotes GTFP through technology innovation and industrial structure upgrade. And the mediation variables also have two-way positive impacts on internet development. After accounting robustness test, the empirical conclusions were still valid. Based on the analysis, our study provided scientific and reasonable policies to improve GTFP in Yangtze River economic belt.

2022年7月16日,全国碳市场正式启动上线交易一周年.生态环境部提供的数据显示,全国碳市场首个履约期共纳入发电行业重点排放单位2162家,覆盖约45亿吨二氧化碳排放量,占全国二氧化碳排放总量的40％以上.上海环境能源交易所数据显示,截至2022年7月13日收盘,全国碳市场累积成交量1.94亿吨,累积成交额约84.9亿元,已经成为全球覆盖温室气体排放量规模最大的碳市场.