Measurement Research on the Decoupling Effect of Industries’ Carbon Emissions—Based on the Equipment Manufacturing Industry in China

Economic development usually leads to increased energy consumption, which in turn will result in an increase in carbon emissions. To break the relationship between economic development and carbon emissions, scholars have turned their attention to the phenomenon of decoupling. In this paper, we studied the decoupling relationship between carbon emissions and economic growth of the equipment manufacturing industry in China from 2000 to 2014. We adapted the LMDI decomposition method, and we used the Tapio decoupling evaluation model to analyze our data. We found that the decoupling relationship between carbon emissions and economic growth of China’s equipment manufacturing industry is weak, which indicates the industry is experiencing faster economic growth than carbon emission growth. We found the economic output is the factor that has the strongest influence on the industry’s carbon emission, and energy consumption intensity has the strongest relationship with the decoupling of economic growth and carbon emission. The indicators of the industry’s decoupling-effort are all less than 1.0, which indicates that the industry is in the state of weak decoupling, and we also observed an annual decreasing trend in the industry’s indicators. Toward the end of this paper, we used the Grey forecasting model to predict the decoupling relationship between carbon emission and economic growth for 2015–2024, and we discussed the implications of our research.