Allocation of Provincial Carbon Emission Allowances Under China's 2030 Carbon Peak Target : A Multi-Criteria Dynamic Decision Analysis Method

A fair and effective provincial carbon emission allowances (CEA) allocation is significant to balance socio-economic development and emission reduction goals for China. Thus, this paper designs a multi-criteria dynamic CEA allocation model based on four criteria (egalitarianism, historical responsibility, emission reduction capability and emission efficiency) to calculate the provincial CEA year by year before 2030, with the implied emissions of inter-provincial power transfer is considered. Then, the efficiency and fairness of the CEA scheme were evaluated through DEA, environmental Gini coefficient and its grouped decomposition method. The results show that the national overall CEA will peak during the 15th Five-Year Plan (FYP) period. Specifically, the CEA for Eastern and Central is expected to peak first during the 14th FYP period, while the Northeast region's CEA remains stable and that of the Western region continues to grow. Provinces with high carbon emissions, high carbon emission intensity, and high per capita carbon emissions and provinces with particularly high carbon emissions will face great pressure on emission reduction, and their CEA peaks are expected to arrive before 2025 and 2030 respectively. The CEA of less developed provinces will have a surplus. In terms of time, the high emission provinces face greater emission reduction pressure during the 15th FYP period than that during the 14th FYP period. In terms of scheme evaluation, the scheme achieves the double improvement of fairness and efficiency compared with the current actual emissions of various provinces, and reducing the differences of per capita CEA between different regions and between provinces in the West and East regions will help to improve the fairness of the scheme. This study overcomes the shortcomings of the existing researches on the large differences in the distribution of emission reduction pressures in key provinces, and is more feasible in practice