Abstract: As the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide emissions, China has promised to reach its peak carbon emissions by 2030 or earlier, thus facing a major challenge on aspect of emission reduction for its potential impact on climate change. To efficiently realize green development, it's important to identify the driving factors as well as the critical supply chain paths that drive changes in life cycle CO₂ emissions and aid both policy makers and decision makers by enabling the tracing of the change in key production chains over time. In this paper, based on the 1995-2014 linked Chinese environmental non-competitive (import) input-output tables, structural decomposition analysis (SDA) and structural path decomposition (SPD) methods are applied to investigate the relative impact of various factors and extract critical supply chains involved in changes in CO₂ emissions over this study period. The IO tables and historical carbon emissions data by sector for China range from 1995 to 2014, extending over a 20-year study period. The influence on changes of CO₂ emissions derived from final demand is composed of six factors:sectoral emission intensity (c); intermediate input product structure (L); product structure of final demand (ψ); category composition of final demand (δ); per capita final demand (Y), and population (P). The detailed analysis reveals that the per capita final demand is the dominant driving factor in China's CO₂ emissions growth, while the change of emission intensity of production in China greatly offset the growth of emissions, and intermediate input product structure further lead to emissions growth. From the perspective of supply chain paths, the top ranking path affecting CO₂ emissions is identified to be "non-metallic mineral industry→construction→fixed capital formation". We also find that the supply chain paths with the largest increasing and decreasing overall impacts are "non-metallic mineral industry→fixed capital formation", and "Electricity, gas and water supply→fixed capital formation", respectively. And the conclusions of this paper provide insights into the driving factors influencing CO₂ emissions and boost supervision of critical emissions supply chain paths, offering theoretical and practical supports for the policy makers and decision makers reasonable measures that can be applied progressively to aid in China's carbon abatement in reality.

Key words: CO₂ emissions, structural decomposition analysis, structural path decomposition, driving factors, critical supply chain paths