Achieving China's Carbon Neutrality Target: Decarbonization Risk Identification and Countermeasure Design

The realization of China's carbon neutrality goal will systematically reshape the energy utilization pattern in the whole society, and will face great risks from both the micro and macro perspectives. Thus it is necessary to identify the decarbonization risks and understand its conduction mechanism during the whole process. In this paper, a three-stage framework consists of "R&D-application-promotion" is constructed for the innovation and transformation of low-carbon/zero-carbon/negative-carbon technologies to analyze the conduction path from the whole system. According to the results, five categories are identified including the maturity of technology, green premium of products, sinking cost of assets, application of technology and security of supply chain. On this basis, the potential impacts of these risks on China are evaluated from a global scale. It is proposed that China should carefully grasp the risk of carbon reduction in the process of achieving the carbon neutrality goal from a systematic perspective, and jointly promote from five main aspects including policy guiding, carbon monitoring and accounting, scientific and technological talents fostering, innovation environment cultivating, international cooperating. At last, suggestions are provided for the policymaking in dealing with the systematic decarbonization risks in China's net-zero emissions transition.