Spatial-Temporal Heterogeneity for Commercial Building Carbon Emissions in China: Based the Dagum Gini Coefficient

There is great potential for carbon emission reduction in commercial buildings. Determining the spatial-temporal heterogeneity of CCBCE (China's commercial building carbon emissions) is crucial for developing differentiated emissions mitigation policies. This paper estimated CCBCE and then adopted a method involving the visualization of spatial data, Dagum Gini coefficient, and kernel density estimation to analyze the spatial-temporal characteristics and regional differences in China's eight economic regions in 2006-2019. The results indicate that: (1) The CCBCE displayed a general upward trend, increasing from 400.99 million t (tons) to 853.23 million t. The CCBCE from electricity accounted for the largest share (65.93% in 2009). Moreover, Guangdong was the only high-emission province in 2019 with 77.8 million t CCBCE. (2) The contribution rate of the different economic regions to incremental carbon emissions made a significant difference, and inter-regional differences (61.81%) were much higher than intra-regional differences (7.99%). (3) The greatest intra-regional differences were found in the Southern coastal economic region (average Gini coefficient up to 0.4782). For inter-regional differences, the disparity between the Northern coastal economic region and Northwest economic region was greatest. Further, the regional differences presented a trend of increase. The study concludes that effective measures should be taken to reduce the CCBCE in each region and narrow the regional gap of CCBCE.