Conference Agenda

As China is a major contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions, its 2060 carbon-neutrality commitment is pivotal to international climate mitigation. Achieving this goal requires credible evidence on which provincial climate policy measures deliver scalable emissions reductions, evidence that is often obscured by overlapping regulations and heterogeneous enforcement. We conduct a systematic ex-post evaluation of roughly 2,400 provincial low-carbon policy measures implemented between 2007 and 2022. Moving beyond traditional econometric designs, we develop a machine learning-based reverse causal inference framework that first detects structural breaks in sectoral carbon dioxide emissions — power, industry, buildings, and transport — and then attributes these shifts to specific local policy measures.

We identify 53 policy interventions that successfully reduced emissions, collectively delivering a 6.5 billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide abatement, equivalent to approximately 4.3\% of total scope 1 emissions across all regions and sectors between 2007 and 2022. The distribution of realized mitigation is highly uneven: industry contributes the largest share of observed reductions, while buildings and transport display stronger average responsiveness once policy packages become sectorally aligned.

The results reveal a clear disconnect between policy volume and mitigation effectiveness. Policy-rich provinces such as Shanghai do not necessarily exhibit detectable structural breaks, whereas repeated breaks in provinces such as Yunnan, Henan, Inner Mongolia, and Shandong emerge under more selective policy configurations. Across sectors, the industrial sector is governed almost exclusively through integrated policy mixes, whereas single market-based instruments are frequently sufficient in the power and transport sectors. We further find that policy stringency does not systematically rise at the onset of structural breaks; instead, breaks are associated with concentrated pressure within specific instrument–objective combinations rather than with broad-based policy escalation. These findings support a shift toward targeted, portfolio-focused policy design to better translate climate ambitions into realized mitigation outcomes.