Abstract
China is a country with substantial differences in economic development, energy consumption mix, resources, and technologies, as well as the development path at the provincial level. Therefore, China’s provinces have different potential and degrees of difficulty to carry out carbon emission reduction (CER) requirements. In addition, interprovincial trade, with a large amount of embodied carbon emissions, has become the fastest growing driver of China’s total carbon emissions. A reasonable CER allocation plan is, therefore, crucial for realizing the commitment that China announced in the Paris Agreement. How to determine a fair way to allocate provincial CER duties has become a significant challenge for both policy-makers and researchers. In this paper, ecological network analysis (ENA), combined with a multi-regional input-output model (MRIO), is adopted to build an ecological network of embodied emissions across 30 provinces. Then, by using flow analysis and utility analysis based on the ENA model, the specific relationships among different provinces were determined, and the amount of responsibility that a certain province should take quantified, with respect to the embodied carbon emission (ECE) flows from interprovincial trade. As a result, we suggest a new CER allocation plan, based on the detailed data of interprovincial relationships and ECE flows.