Global carbon reduction and economic growth under autonomous economies

Abstract The ecological and environmental issues caused by climate change have affected human health and social development. Accordingly, scientists have focused on addressing climate change. IAMs (Integrated Assessment Models) have been widely used to assess the effect of global climate governance. Since the US withdrew from the Paris Agreement and the UK broke away from the European Union, global economic development takes on an uncertain path. The worldwide trade war triggered by the US has shown that international trade may be weakened in the future. The deglobalization in global economic progress forces individual innovation within countries. Therefore, we constructed a new IAM under autonomous economies—EMRICES-E (Expanded Multi-Regional Integrated model of Climate and Economy System-Equilibrium), which contains a layered structure of national computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to describe an individual country’s development and analyzes the effects of global reductions in cooperation based on the new global situation. Considering that technical progress is a significant factor in carbon reduction, we introduced endogenous technical progress in CGE. Simulation results show that developing countries/regions have large carbon emissions under the baseline scenario with their economic status increasing at the same time, climate change would lead to economic recession if there are no carbon reductions for countries/regions and the industrial structure of developing countries changes noticeably compared with developed countries.