Research on carbon emission standards of automobile industry in BRI participating countries

As emerging markets, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) participating countries have great development room for automobile industries. Yet the greater climate change pressure may hinder the development of the upstream and downstream industries chain of domestic automobile industries. Therefore, a sound carbon emission standard system should be established to guide carbon emission accounting, emissions management and so on. This study selects Singapore, Indonesia, Poland, South Africa, Pakistan as the typical research objects, and thereby analyzes the development status of carbon emissions standards in BRI participating countries’ automobile industries from the perspective of standard type, standard name, vehicle model range, target value, accounting boundaries, etc. In this paper, standard types are categorized based on management objects, such as fuel standard and carbon emissions standard. The accounting boundary, namely, the scope included in management, is divided into driving phase, life cycle phase and so on. In the meanwhile, based on comparative analysis method, China, United States (US) and the European Union (EU) are selected as the control group to study the existing problems of the carbon emission standards in BRI participating countries. The results show that the automobile industry of the BRI participating countries is still facing several problems to be solved, such as the lack of low-carbon technology, technical standard system of carbon emission, and the targeted carbon reduction policy framework, etc. Based on the above analysis results, policy recommendations have been proposed based on two categories of BRI participating countries to give scientific and reasonable advice for the construction of carbon emission standards for automobile industry.