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A reduction in the CO2 emission intensity (ton per gross domestic product) from a base year to a target year with different rates of reduction in each individual year can yield different cumulative CO2 emissions over time, which could have different effects on the climate. In this paper, an indicator is proposed to measure the extent to which the cumulative CO2 emissions are generated by a specific reduction trajectory of CO2 emission intensity, especially for emerging economies with a relatively higher economic growth rate. The proposed indicator is important for less-developed countries and regions in which economic growth is heavily reliant on energy and in which significant potential exists for improvement of energy efficiency. The indicator is applied to evaluate the CO2 emission reduction performance in China's 12th Five-Year Plan period, and the result is not encouraging, especially when the likely gap between the energy conservation goals and temperature goals is further examined. Mitigation goals should be set by considering not only the performance in the final year, but also the reduction in cumulative emissions over the evaluation period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite recent voluntary climate change reporting (VCCR) initiatives, such as the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), Chinese companies continue to lag behind their global counterparts. This research contributes to the existing literature examining the effects of CEO background (specifically academic, foreign and political background) on corporate decisions to engage in VCCR. The data sample consists of Chinese listed companies that participated in CDP surveys during 2010–2017 (1041 final firm-year observations). The study's descriptive findings reveal that most Chinese companies are reluctant to report their climate change information to the CDP as only 12% of Chinese companies participated in the CDP annual survey during the study period. However, using a logistic regression model, we find that CEOs with academic experience, foreign exposure and political connections positively affect firms' decisions to engage in VCCR. The results remain robust when we use the propensity score matching technique to account for sample selection problems. Overall, the results are interpreted within the theoretical insights of the upper echelons perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To mitigate the detrimental effects of climate change exacerbated by excessive carbon emissions, China has introduced a series of environmental regulations designed to promote low-carbon technology diffusion among enterprises. The existing literature ignores the heterogeneity of the scales of enterprises, making it extremely difficult to put forward targeted policies for enterprises of different scales. In this study, we employ a complex network-based evolutionary game approach to analyze the effect of environmental regulations on the diffusion of low-carbon technology, and thereby determine the relationship between the degree of diffusion and the strength of regulations at different scales of enterprise. The results revealed that with respect to the degree of diffusion, there are significant differences in the sensitivity of enterprises in 20- and 100-scale networks to the imposition of three types of environmental regulation (innovation subsidy, carbon tax, and punishment). When the scale of the network is fixed, fluctuation in the change in degree becomes larger, and even irregular, with an increase in enterprise scale. With an increase in network scale for small, medium, and large enterprises, the range of variation in the degree of diffusion becomes smaller. In small, medium, and large enterprises, when the scale of the network increases from 20 to 100, the degree of diffusion will increase in response to the same strength of innovation subsidy, carbon tax, and punishment. With an increase in innovation subsidies, the diffusion degree of large enterprises will improve slightly. Moreover, for large enterprises, increasing the strength of punishment has no obvious effects with regards to improving the degree of diffusion. At all scales of enterprise, in both the 20- and 100-sacle networks, the degree of diffusion will increase with an increase in the strength of the carbon tax. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]