The peak of CO₂ emissions in China: A new approach using survival models

Chinese government proposed the target that China's CO₂ emissions could peak by 2030. Under this background, this paper focused on when and how can China's CO₂ emissions reach peak. By analyzing the survival data of 91 countries from 1960 to 2014, this paper adopted the survival models to explore the factors that could influence the timing of emissions peaking and predicted the conditional probability of realizing the peak of CO₂ emissions. The empirical results indicated that the total-factor productivity (TFP) plays a very important role with the average marginal effect of 0.012 and 0.066 for OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) and non-OECD countries, respectively. It was estimated that China would peak in 2030, 2028 and 2025 in three different scenarios with the probability of >50%. The probability of peaking will increase to 98% in 2037, 2034 and 2030 under the these scenarios. These findings could help policy-makers to reduce carbon emissions and achieve the CO₂ emissions target.