Decoupling Measurement of Regional CO2 Emissions Growth: A Case Study of Chongqing, China

Abstract

It is essentially and urgently to decouple CO2 emissions growth from economic growth in the era of industrialization which has made seriously environmental pollution. But how to evaluate the state of CO2 emissions growth decoupling from the regional economic growth? The authors in this paper discover the linkage from "coupling" to "decoupling" between CO2emissions growth and regional economic growth by using Tapio model based on the case study of Chongqing Municipality of China. It indicates that the Chongqing Municipality’s state ofCO2 emissions growth decoupling from regional economic growth is very weak. During the years from 1997 to 2015, there was a trend of weak decoupling, strong decoupling, and negative decoupling of expansion between Chongqing's economic growth and its CO2 emission growth, that is, 58% of the years were in the decoupling elastic value scale of 0<r<0.8, which shows that the speed of Chongqing's economic growth is faster than that of its CO2 emissions growth, but the state of CO2 emissions growth decoupling from economic growth is still relatively low. In the future, the improvement of CO2 emissions efficiency through green and low-CO2 development is the main roadmap of increasing the state of CO2 emissions growth decoupling from economic growth in Chongqing Municipality.