Are Developed Regions in China Achieving Their CO2 Emissions Reduction Targets on Their Own?—Case of Beijing

The extensive and close economic linkages among different regions of China have effects not only on regional economic growth, but also on CO2 emissions and carbon leakage among regions. Taking Beijing as a study case, we constructed MRIO models for China’s 30 provinces and municipalities for 2002, 2007 and 2010, to measure the embodied CO2 emissions in the interregional trade of China on regional and industrial levels to explore their changes over time, and to analyze the driving forces of the final demand-induced interregional CO2 emissions through an SDA model. Results showed that Beijing was a surplus region for embodied carbon and the net input embodied CO2 emissions were in industries with high CO2 emission coefficients, while the net output embodied carbon was in industries with low carbon-emission coefficients. Beijing’s trade with non-Beijing areas led to an increase in the total CO2 emissions in China and a composite effect of Beijing and the efficiency effect of non-Beijing areas were the main effects behind the reduction of Beijing’s input embodied carbon. The results have yielded important implications for China’s CO2 emissions control: first, the embodied CO2 need be taken into consideration when formulating CO2 emissions control measures; second, CO2 emission reduction requirements should be reasonably distributed across the provinces to reduce carbon leakage in interprovincial trade; third, the consumption structure in the production chain needs to be moderately adjusted; and last but not least, financial and technical support for CO2 emissions control in the central and western provinces should be strengthened.