Contribution of renewable energy consumption to CO₂ emissions mitigation: a comparative analysis from the income levels’ perspective in the belt and road initiative (BRI) region

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to retrospectively quantify the contribution of renewable energy consumption (REC) to mitigate the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions for the belt and road initiative (BRI) region. The reason is that, so far, still few scientists have deeply analyzed this underlying impact, especially from the income levels’ perspective. Design/methodology/approach The study divides the BRI region into four groups by the income levels (high, HI; upper middle, UM; lower middle, LM; lower, LO) during 1992–2014 and uses the logarithmic mean Divisia index. Findings The results show the REC of the BRI has an overall decreasing trend but the driving contribution to the CO2 growth except that the HI group’s REC has an obviously mitigating contribution of −2.09%. The number indicates that it is necessary and urgent to exploit and use renewable energy, especially in mid- and low-income countries due to the large potential of carbon mitigation. Besides, during 2010–2014, the energy intensity effects of different groups were negative except for the low income group (positive, 5.47 million tonnes), which showed that some poor countries recently reduced CO2 emissions only by extensively using renewable energy but not enhancing the corresponding efficiency. Conversely, in other rich countries, people paid more attention to improve the energy-use efficiency to lower energy intensity. Originality/value This study creatively analyzes this underlying impact of the REC to mitigate the CO2 emissions from the income levels’ perspective and proposes some reasonable countermeasures of reducing CO2 for the BRI region.

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