China’s carbon accounting system in the context of carbon neutrality: Current situation, challenges and suggestions

Global climate governance is currently at the stage of carbon neutrality.Improving the quality of emissions inventories at different levels has become a critical climate governance task,which not only contributes to the Global Stocktake but also helps verify compliance progress and address new trade barriers.This study provides a comprehensive review of international carbon accounting standards and guidelines while assessing the potential impact of upcoming carbon tax policies,such as the EU CBAM and the U.S.CCA.On this basis,the current situation and challenges of China's carbon emission accounting system are systematically analysed,and suggestions for improvement are proposed.The results show that carbon tax policies will increase the requirements for emission inventories and will strengthen the correlation between different levels.The improvement of China's carbon accounting system should be accelerated.Although the regional carbon accounting guidelines are already in line with international guidelines,further improvements are needed at the enterprise and product levels.New boundaries need to be set in China's corporate carbon accounting guidelines,and the speed of developing product carbon accounting guidelines should be increased.The quality of emissions inventories should be comprehensively improved by implementing a combination of policies,including corporate carbon information disclosure,green supply chain construction,activity data statistics and verification,and a dynamic emission factor database.

Research on the national climate governance system toward carbon neutrality-A critical literature review

Global climate governance has entered the era of carbon neutrality,as a growing number of countries have set the goal of carbon neutrality for long-term emissions reduction toward the mid-21st century.In 2020,China also pledged itself to the goal of carbon neutrality,which creates an urgent demand for this country to establish a systematic and integrated national climate governance system.Against this background,this paper conducts a systematic literature review of climate governance systems from the perspectives of top-level design and the governance paradigm to bring insights into climate governance toward carbon neutrality.The results show that although there are interactions between decarbonization and other environmental,social and economic fields,research gaps still exist when enhancing climate governance toward carbon neutrality.For example,issues regarding incorporating climate factors into the overall economic and social layout,strengthening the capacity of data collection relevant to climate adaptation,integrating climate mitigation and adaption actions,as well as connecting domestic climate governance and international cooperation,need to be further addressed.In addition,within the national governance system,studies combining both regional and sectoral concerns and the intertemporal dynamic allocation mechanism need to be further addressed when China decomposes its national climate target.Moreover,the division of power between the central government and local government,as well as the communication scheme between government and non-state actors,also turns out to be important for effective governance.Based on this analysis,policy implications are further proposed for China’s formulation and implementation of long-term strategies of climate governance toward carbon neutrality.

Research on the carbon neutrality governance under a polycentric approach

Carbon neutrality has increasingly become a crucial agenda within global climate governance.Meanwhile,recent observations show that the governance architecture for carbon neutrality is transforming to polycentricity.However,there is still a lack of systematic investigation on carbon neutrality governance under the polycentric approach.Against this background,this study attempts to investigate the emergence and structure of polycentric climate governance,and to figure out to what extent the evolving polycentric system can contribute to the climate change governance towards carbon neutrality.The results show that efforts made by actors at transnational and subnational levels within the polycentric system can greatly complement the deficits of carbon neutrality governance by international regime and state government in many different domains.Besides,the identified issues,that are critical to carbon neutrality including climate legislation,adaptation,technology deployment and data authenticity and transparency,can be addressed in a more effective way through the coordination among multiple actors at multiple levels.Finally,further research should be conducted to address the dynamic linkages between international regimes as well as the issues related to small and medium-sized cities,and develop a comprehensive evaluation and accounting system for the risks and benefits of polycentric climate governance.

Identifying the Key Reference of a Scientific Publication

The most fundamental way to measure the impact of a scientific publication is using the number of citations it received.Though citation count and its variants are widely adopted,they have been pointed out to be poor proxies for a paper's quality because a citation might result from different reasons.It is thus crucial to quantify the true relevance of the cited papers to the citing paper.There are already some eforts in the literature devoted to addressing this isue,yet a well-accepted method is still lacking,possibly due to the absence of standard ground truth data for comparing different methods.In this paper,we propose a simple method using a local diffusion process on citation networks for identifying the key references for each scientific publication.The effectiveness and of the method are validated in a subset of the American Physical Society data in which the key references are mentioned in the abstract of papers.We further define an effective citation metric for quantifying the actual impact of each paper and its evolution.The effective citation metric additionally reveals the citation preference of research at journal and country levels.