Purpose: China is confronting with tremendous pressure in carbon emission reduction. While
logistics industry seriously relies on fossil fuel, and emits greenhouse gas, especially carbon
dioxide. The aim of this article is to estimate the carbon dioxide emission in China’s logistics
sector, and analyze the causes for the change of carbon dioxide emission, and identify the
critical factors which mainly drive the change in carbon dioxide emissions of China’s logistics
industry.
Design/methodology/approach: The logarithmic mean Divisia index (LMDI) method has
often been used to analyze decomposition of energy consumption and carbon emission due to
its theoretical foundation, adaptability, ease of use and result interpretation. So we use the
LMDI method to analyze the changes in carbon dioxide emission of China’s logistics industry
in this paper.
Findings: By analyzing carbon dioxide emission of China’s logistics, the results show that the
carbon dioxide emission of logistics in China has increased by 21.5 times, from 45.1 million
tons to 1014.1 million tons in the research period. The highway transport is the main
contributor to carbon dioxide emission in logistics industry. The energy intensity and carbon
dioxide emission factors contributed to the reduction of carbon dioxide emission in China’s
logistics industry in overall study period.
Originality/value: Although a lot of literature have analyzed carbon dioxide emission in many
industry sectors, such as manufacturing, iron and steel, pulp and paper, cement, glass industry,
and so on. However, few scholars researched on carbon dioxide emission in logistics industry.
This is the first study which is in the context of carbon dioxide emission of China’s logistics
industry.
