Public Acceptability of Personal Carbon Trading in China: an Empirical Research

Abstract

The global warming that is caused by a large number of greenhouse gases emissions has been a giant challenge of human society and sustainable development. China is the biggest carbon emissions country in the world. In order to solve this problem, implementation of an innovative policy is necessary. Personal carbon trading (PCT) is latest idea on the subject of new policy to control the carbon emission. But whether a new policy can be implemented, it depends on its public acceptability. In this article we discussed public acceptability of PCT by exploring the influencing factors and its level of acceptance in China. We designed a questionnaire with five aspects to collect data from three main cities of China. We applied ordinal logistic regression model to investigate the factors which influence public acceptability. The pre dominant results show that acceptability is affected by eight factors such as education, income, perceived threat to humans and the environment in the municipality, perceived level of personal carbon emissions, perceived fair, anticipated behavior to save carbon quotas for traveling, infringement of freedom and anticipated behavior to save carbon quotas for selling. Mostly have positive impact on public acceptability except last two factors. Moreover our results do not support the highly acceptance of PCT in China. There is a considerable validation to conduct this study, because empirical evidence—in developing countries—is limited. It is obvious that this dimension of understanding is necessary for promotion of new idea as new effective policy implementation to control the carbon emission.

Keywords: Personal carbon trading, personal carbon allowances, carbon emissions, public acceptability, ordered logistic regression, climate change