Identifying carbon emission characteristics and carbon peak in China based on the perspective of regional clusters

Global warming has endangered the natural ecosystem's balance, as well as human existence and development, and it is mostly caused by carbon dioxide. Identifying carbon emission characteristics and predicting carbon emission reasonably is helpful to provide indication for the effective design of emission reduction path. The most literature use a single prediction model; this paper predicts carbon emission using a number of strategies based on previous research. Considering the prediction accuracy, advantages, and disadvantages of each method, a new method combining autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model and NAR neural network (NAR-NN) is proposed; in addition, this paper attempts to explain the carbon emission characteristics and emission reduction paths of each region from the new perspective of clustering. First, the results show that China's carbon emission features can be divided into four categories: low-carbon demonstrative type, low-carbon potential type, high-carbon developed type, and high-carbon traditional type. Moreover, low-carbon demonstrative type includes merely Beijing and Shanghai, low-carbon potential type is distributed in the southeast coastal areas of China, the high-carbon developed type is mainly distributed in Northeast China, and the western region basically belongs to high-carbon traditional type. Second, ARIMA model and NAR-NN are the two best methods in terms of prediction effect, and the combined model has better prediction effect than the single model. Third, carbon emissions in most regions of China will increase in the next few years; the time of carbon peak in the east is earlier than that in the west regions of China. Beijing will probably be the first region in China to complete the carbon peak. Besides, there is a certain correlation between the carbon peak time and the type of carbon emission in each region.