Estimating the Contribution of Industry Structure Adjustment to the Carbon Intensity Target: A Case of Guangdong

Industry structure adjustment is an effective measure to achieve the carbon intensity target of Guangdong Province. Accurately evaluating the contribution of industry structure adjustment to the carbon intensity target is helpful for the government to implement more flexible and effective policies and measures for CO2 emissions reduction. In this paper, we attempt to evaluate the contribution of industry structure adjustment to the carbon intensity target. Firstly, we predict the gross domestic product (GDP) with scenario forecasting, industry structure with the Markov chain model, CO2 emissions with a novel correlation mode based on least squares support vector machine, and then we assess the contribution of industry structure adjustment to the carbon intensity target of Guangdong during the period of 2011–2015 under nine scenarios. The obtained results show, in the ideal scenario, that the economy will grow at a high speed and the industry structure will be significantly adjusted, and thus the carbon intensity in 2015 will decrease by 25.53% compared to that in 2010, which will make a 130.94% contribution to the carbon intensity target. Meanwhile, in the conservative scenario, the economy will grow at a low speed and the industry structure will be slightly adjusted, and thus the carbon intensity in 2015 will decrease by 23.89% compared to that in 2010, which will make a 122.50% contribution to the carbon intensity target