Understanding driving patterns of carbon emissions from the transport sector in China: evidence from an analysis of panel models

China’s transport industry has made rapid progress, which has led to a great amount of carbon emissions. However, it is still unclear how carbon emissions from the transport sector are punctuated by shifts in underlying factors. This paper aims to examine the process of China’s carbon emissions from the transport sector as well as its major driving forces at the provincial level during the period of 2000 to 2015. We first estimate the carbon emissions from the transport sector at the provincial level based on the fuel and electricity consumption using a top-down method. We find that the carbon emission per capita is steadily increasing across the country, especially in the provinces of Chongqing and Inner Mongolia. However, the carbon emission intensity is decreasing in most provinces, except in Yunnan, Qinghai, Chongqing, Zhejiang, Heilongjiang, Jilin, Inner Mongolia, Henan and Anhui. We then quantify the effect of socioeconomic factors and their regional variations on carbon emissions using a panel model. The results show that the development of secondary industry is the most significant variable for carbon intensity at both the national and regional levels, while the effects of the other variables vary across regions. Among these factors, population density is the main factor of the increasing carbon emissions per capita from the transport sector for both the whole country and the western region, whereas the consumption level per capita of residents and the development of tertiary industry are the primary drivers of per capita carbon emissions for the eastern and central regions.

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