Regional allocation of carbon emissions in China based on zero sum gains data envelopment analysis model

Along with China's increasing share in global total $CO_2$ emissions, there is a necessity for China to shoulder large emission-mitigating responsibility. The appropriate allocation of $CO_2$ emission quotas can build up a solid foundation for future emissions trading. In views of originality, an optimized approach to determine $CO_2$ emissions allocation efficiency based on the zero sum gains data envelopment analysis (ZSG-DEA) method is proposed. This paper uses a non-radial ZSG-DEA model to allocate $CO_2$ emissions between different Chinese provinces by 2020 and treats $CO_2$ as the undesirable output variable. Through the calculation of efficiency allocation amounts of provincial $CO_2$ emissions, all provinces are on the ZSG-DEA efficiency frontier. The allocation results indicate that the cumulative optimal amounts of $CO_2$ emissions in 2020 were higher than the actual amounts in 13 provinces, and lower in other 17 provinces, and show that different provinces have to shoulder different mitigation burdens in terms of emission reduction.