1. A new perspective on global carbon emission inequality: insights from global interpersonal carbon Gini-index
Presented By: Tianpeng Wang
Institute of Energy-Environment-Economic, Tsinghua University

2. Introduction
Global emission inequality is a debate focus related to abatement responsibility
Emission inequality researches mainly fall into two categories
Emission inequality across countries: Developed vs Developing
Emission inequality across persons: Rich vs Poor
global interpersonal emission inequality
Consider emission inequality both from across countries view and across persons view
Global Interpersonal Carbon Inequality

3. Introduction Traditional methods to measure carbon inequality
emission
population
Traditional methods to measure carbon inequality
Carbon Lorenz curve and carbon Gini-index
Atkinson Index
Theil’s entropy measure
…….
Concepts related to emission
Emission from fossil fuel consumption
Consumption based emission: influence of transferred emission of
Main focus in our study: total emission and emission from household consumption

4. Methods Figure 1. Summarize of the methodlogy process
Emulate income distribution curve of various countries
Build the relationship between income and emission based on literature and some assumptions
Construct different countries’ emission distribution curve combined with emission data
Aggregate emission distribution curves of all the countries
Construct the global Lorenz curve and calculate the global carbon Gini-index

5. Methods: Emulate income distribution curve of various countries
2-gamma fitting method
Lognormal fitting method
Data needed:
Income distribution data
GDP per capital data
Income Gini-index of different countries
Data source: World Development Indicator (WDI)
World Income Inequality database (WIID)

6. Electricity consumption
Methods: Build the relationship between income and emission based on literature and some assumptions
Country
Variable 1
Variable 2
Year
Elasticities
Australia
Income
Household CO2 emission
0.55
Energy consumption
0.59
Expenditures
0.7
0.74
0.78
Brazil
1.0
Denmark
1995
0.48
0.51
0.86
India
2004
1.008
Japan
1999
0.64
Netherland
1990
0.63
0.83
New Zealand
1980
0.4
Norway
1973
0.72
Spain
2000
United State
0.85
South Africa
Electricity consumption
0.32
China
2002
0.84
United Kingdom
0.432
Philippines
2000&2006
0.8
Finland
GHG emission
2006
0.6
Classification
Elasticities
Developed countries
Developing countries
LDC
Total fossil fuel caused emission data: EDGAR database and CAIT database.
Emission from household consumption: multi-regional input output model (MRIO) based on the GTAP9 database in year and 2011.

7. Methods: Construct different countries’ emission distribution and global Lorenz curve
Figure 2. Emission distribution curve and global carbon Lorenz curve

8. Results: The trend of global Gini-index from total fossil fuel emission side view
Figure 3. Variance trend of global interpersonal carbon Gini-index

9. Results: Global CO2 emission distribution curve and emission migration

10. Results: Comparsion of inequality from total carbon emission and household consumption based emission
Figure 4. The proportion of emission from residential consumption in total consumption based emission
Table 2. the comparsion of global interpersonal carbon Gini-index respectively based on production side emission and consumption side emission
Year
2004
2007
2011
Gini-index on production based emission (interpersonal)
0.618
0.607
0.590
Gini-index on residential consumption based emission (interpersonal)
0.674
0.659
0.630
Gini-index on production based emission (intercountries)
0.546
0.525
0.501
Gini-index on residential consumption based emission (intercountries)
0.620
0.600
0.564

11. Figure 5. The proportion of emission respectively from fossil fuel use and household consumption by different income group in whole emission, 2011
production consumption production consumption production consumption

12. Results: Sensitivity analysis of income elasticities
Figure 5. Influence of unit alteration from different income elasticities on Gini-index based on emission from total fosill fuel consumption and household consumption caused emission

13. Discussion and Limits
The value of carbon Gini-index came down from 0.67 in 1980 to 0.59 in 2014
Decline of emission inequality at global scale
Mainly because of the narrowing between-groups emission gap
The global carbon inequality status is still very severe with Gini-index is around 0.6 in recent years especially from household consumption view.
Provides a theoretical basis for the abatement responsibility assignment on inter- personal level rather than on national level across countries
Main limits of this research: the rough assumption of relationship between emission and income.

14. Thank You