Carbon Footprint Change of Energy Consumption in Gansu Province and Its Influencing Factors
甘肃省能源消费碳足迹变化及影响因素分析

Energy consumption is one of the main human activities that affect global climate change, and therefore research on carbon footprint of energy consumption has great significance. In this paper, firstly, concepts and methods relating to carbon footprint of energy consumption were used to calculate the total carbon footprint, carbon footprint of each type of energy, output value of the carbon footprint and its ecological pressure from 1990 to 2009 in Gansu Province. Then, ridge regression function for STIRPAT model was applied to study the quantitative relationship between carbon footprint and economic growth and at the same time verify the existence of Environmental Kuznets Curve. Finally, the decoupling index was introduced to further explore the dynamic relationship between economic growth and carbon footprint. The results show that: 1) The total carbon footprint has increased from 0.091 hm2 per capita in 1990 to 0.191 hm2 per capita in 2009, presenting a fluctuated rising trend; 2) For carbon footprint composition of each type of energy consumptions, coal and oil occupy the dominant position while natural gas is of little effect; 3) Output value of carbon footprint has increased from 11,800 RMB per hm2 in 1990 to 25,100 RMB per hm2 in 2009, with an average annual growth rate of 4.1%. This means that economic growth of Gansu depends much on fossil energy such as coal, oil and so on; 4) Ecological pressure intensity of carbon footprint has increased to 0.24 in 2009 and is much lower than that in developed regions such as Jiangsu and Shanghai. This is mainly due to the vast area of woodland in Gansu, which reaches up to 46% of the total land area. Development of low-carbon economy is still confronted with many problems, such as limited energy, fragile ecological environment and irrational energy structure. The growth of population and GDP per capita are the two main factors that drive the increase of carbon footprint, and the environmental impact of population is 3.47 times of that of GDP per capita under the same condition. Both regression analysis and decoupling index analysis have proved the existence of Environmental Kuznets Curve between economic growth and carbon footprint but it needs 33 years to achieve the inflection point.