Exploring key sectors of CO2 emissions and driving factors to spatiotemporal evolution in China from multiple perspectives

Identifying CO2 emission from different perspectives is necessary for developing the effective mitigation policies for China. Previous studies mainly focus on exploring important sectors from production and consumption sides, while the perspective of betweenness has been neglected. For narrowing the gap, a new perspective for accounting the critical transmission sectors is discussed. In this study, we calculated and compared the CO2 emissions of production-based, consumption-based, and betweenness-based from 2012 to 2017 based on the multi-regional input–output (MRIO) model. A structural decomposition analysis (SDA) is conducted to uncover the driving forces of CO2 emissions change from three accounting principles. The Findings are as follows: (1) the heavy industry sector (559.26 Mt) in Shandong and Jiangsu (471.97 Mt), Power in Guangdong (83.77 Mt) and Beijing (199.24 Mt), Equipment in Jiangsu (213.88 Mt) are identified as the key transmission sectors; (2) the emission intensity effect and the final demand product structure effect contribute to CO2 emission decrease in China, which are largely offset by the structure effect of final demand source and the final demand scale effect. Based on this, we propose some typical policy implications, such as paying close attention to the production efficiency of the key transmission sectors, optimizing the intermediate product input structure and increasing investment in the technology level, and then reducing the intensity of carbon emission.