Assessing the effectiveness of china’s pilot emission trading schemes based on kaya identity parameters: the case of Beijing, shanghai and Guangdong
Student name: Mr Sahil Aggarwal
Guide: Dr Kamna Sachdeva
Year of completion: 2017
Host Organisation: Climate Connect Ltd
Supervisor (Host Organisation): Mr Rahul Rana
Abstract: China is one of the highest energy consuming nations of the world, and accounted for 25%
of the recent global carbon emissions in 2010. After years of relying on inefficient traditional regulatory
approaches to achieve its energy-intensity reduction targets, in 2011 the National Development and Reform
Commission (NDRC) of China finally sanctioned seven pilot carbon trading schemes in Beijing, Shanghai,
Tianjin, Chongqing, Guangdong, Hubei and Shenzhen. This was the first time China experimented with a
market based approach to mitigate climate change. It has been 4 years since the trading in these pilots have
taken place. But so far no such study has assessed the effectiveness of the pilot ETS and reviewed whether the
pilots will be able to meet their specified carbon intensity reduction targets by 2020. Therefore, by generating 3
scenarios; low carbon scenario, base case scenario, and a high carbon scenario, this study aims to predict
trend in provincial carbon emissions in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong from 2015 to 2020 based on the data
from 1998 to 2014 using the Kaya Identity parameters (GDP per capita, population, carbon intensity and
energy intensity) growth rate based model. The results show that Beijing over achieves the target in all the 3
scenarios while Guangdong, being the most energy intensive and largest manufacturing hub of China, is not
able to meet the target even in the stringiest of scenarios. The results for Shanghai show that in the base case
and low carbon scenario, Shanghai just meets its carbon intensity target, while in the high carbon scenario; it is
far off from achieving the goal.
