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Emission trading schemes (ETS) are increasingly becoming a popular policy instrument to balance carbon abatement and economic growth. As a globally unified carbon pricing system has not yet been established, whether regionally operated ETSs cause carbon leakage remains a major concern. Taking China's regional pilot ETSs as a quasi-natural experiment, the study uses the spatial difference-in-differences method to examine how regional ETSs affect carbon emissions in and outside cities of policy implementation. Our analysis finds that China's regional ETS policy contributes to a 6.1% reduction in urban CO 2 emissions and a 6.6% decline in emissions intensity in regulated cities, causing carbon leakages that increase CO 2 emissions in neighboring cities by 1.7% on average. Our finding further suggests that regional ETSs mitigate local CO 2 emissions through outsourcing production, improving energy efficiency and decarbonizing energy structure, whereas the outsourcing of industrial production drives up CO 2 emissions in adjacent cities. Moreover, the performances of regional ETSs vary largely by socioeconomic context and mechanism design. China's regional ETSs reduce CO 2 emissions more effectively in central and industrial cities but with more severe carbon leakage, while rigorous compliance mechanisms and active market trading help deepen carbon abatement and alleviate carbon leakage.

Evaluating the cost-effectiveness of emission trading system (ETS) will explore how to control the total emission amount while minimizing the economic cost. Most related studies employ the difference-in-differences (DID) and multi-period DID models. However, this research highlights the superiority of construction technique and estimation results in the synthetic DID model, and applies it to a new scenario for evaluating the cost-effectiveness of China's pilot ETS. From the construction technique, the synthetic DID model synthesizes more desirable control groups and allows more flexibility in matching treatment units with extreme values by setting weight combinations and intercept terms. From the estimation results, the treatment effects are considered more reliable because ideally satisfy the parallel trend assumption. Specifically, the synthetic DID model indicated that the pilot ETS effectively reduced the marginal abatement cost (MAC) by 24.39%, whereas the traditional DID and multi-period DID models may have overestimated the policy effects by 98.48% and 71.09%. The main reason was the MAC has shown a downward trend before the policy implementation. Moreover, the estimation results of heterogeneity analysis and mechanism test in different models were also different. The synthetic DID model integrates the strengths of the DID model and synthetic control method (SCM), making a methodologically grounded contribution to the existing policy evaluation system., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Excessive greenhouse gas emissions might be the major culprit for environmental degradation, which have direct and indirect adverse impacts in various ways. As the largest emitter of carbon emissions, China suffered great harm from climate change during the past 40 years. Therefore, it becomes necessary to study the impact of carbon emissions on health issues and their potential mechanism. Using the panel data from 30 provinces in China between 2002 and 2017, this study employes and extends the Stochastic Impacts by Regression on Population, Affluence, and Technology (STIRPAT) model and mediating effect model to analyze the direct and indirect effects of carbon emissions. The main results are as follows: (1) Carbon emissions has a certain negative impact on public health, which would increase with the rise of temperature. (2) The increase in carbon emissions has a more significant negative effect on health with the average temperature exceeding 17.75 °C, indicating that the temperature has a threshold effect. (3) The potential health risks become higher with the development of urbanization, but there is no obvious spillover effect in the health consequences. The results remain robust after controlling other factors. This study supplements the literature of climate governance and human health, potentially contributing to the next stage of high-quality and sustainable development., (© 2021. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.)

China has actively participated in global climate governance and put forward its ambitious carbon neutrality target. The formulation of scientific plans has become the primary concern of the policy makers, especially for the 14th and 15th Five-Year Plans (FYP) which are important periods to secure the neutrality pledge and transform the whole economy. Since the carbon emission intensity play a key role in achieving carbon neutrality, it is necessary to summarize and explore the evolution trend of carbon emission intensity as well as its driving factors. Therefore, an integrated decomposition framework is developed to study the carbon emission intensity in the past three FYPs from the national, regional and industrial levels. Furthermore, towards the carbon neutrality target, moderate scenario and advanced scenario are designed to predict the future evolution trend of the carbon emission intensity and driving factors in the 14th and 15th FYPs (2021-2030). The main results are as follows: (1) During the three FYPs, factor substitution is the main force contributing to the decreased carbon emission intensity, but this effect gradually decreased. This indicates that it is an inevitable trend to further promote internal optimization and reform of energy system. (2) The change of energy structure exerts a positive effect on the carbon emission intensity decline, but it is not significant, especially in the industrial sector. (3) With the rich factor endowment, central and eastern regions can reduce carbon emission intensity through factor substitution and industrial structure transformation, while the western region is not. (4) In the future, the role of industrial structure optimization and technology progress will be gradually significant. Finally, our findings provide practical guidance on achieving carbon emission intensity reduction and enlightenments on policymaking., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declared that they have no conflicts of interest to this work., (Copyright © 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)