Zhonghua Zhang

Global warming is a critical crisis threatening human survival and development. International organizations and countries worldwide are introducing policies and practices to achieve carbon neutrality. In China, numerous carbon neutrality policies have been established; however, a systematic understanding of the underlying policy logic is lacking. Using the institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework, this paper analyzes selected carbon neutrality policies in China. We conducted a bibliometric visualization analysis of the texts of 20 policies and matched their logic to the elements of the IAD framework. We established 90 keywords with occurrences of no less than 10 times in China’s carbon neutrality policies. The network visualization analysis identified six clusters. We discuss implementation challenges of China’s carbon neutrality policies, address the policy implementation, and finally outline impacts on China’s carbon neutrality governance. This study responds to the global concern over China’s carbon neutrality commitments by clarifying the institutional logic of China’s policies and actions. This study could provide a reference for countries worldwide that are designing and introducing carbon neutrality policies.

Energy-related CO₂ emissions embodied in international trade have been widely studied by researchers all over the world. By using the bilateral trade input–output (BTIO) approach, this study investigates the CO₂ emissions embodied in China–Japan trade during 1995–2009 and attempts to identify the driving forces for the change in CO₂ emissions embodied in China’s exports to Japan during that period by using structural decomposition analysis (SDA). Result shows that CO₂ emissions embodied in China’s exports increased by about 100% from 1995 to 2009, whereas those embodied in China’s imports increased by about 500% during the same period. Result of this research also reveals that the scale effect had a large influence on the increase in CO₂ emissions embodied in China–Japan trade. The technical effect greatly decreased CO₂ emissions embodied in China’s exports to Japan, but obviously increased those embodied in imports. The influence of the structural effect was relatively small and insignificant in the change of CO₂ emissions embodied in China’s exports to Japan, but was notable in the change of emissions embodied in imports.

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In light of the growth in vertically specialized in global trade, the present paper uses input– output tables from the World Input–Output Database to construct an environmental multi‐regional input–output model to calculate the CO₂ emissions embodied in China's international trade during 1995–2009. The advantage of this model lies in its incorporation of the re‐exported CO₂ emissions component embodied in trade and its ability to differentiate domesticsourced CO₂ emissions from foreign‐sourced CO₂ emissions in trade. The results show that carbon emissions embodied in both China's exports and imports increased significantly during 1995–2009. One important reason for this is that the re‐exported carbon emissions embodied in China's imported intermediate inputs increased substantially during this period. Our research reveals that accelerating the transformation of trade pattern and upgrading processing trade should be emphasized in the formulation of policy to prompt CO₂ emissions abatement in China.