Abstract
The first commitment period (2008-2012) under the Kyoto protocol has expired. This paper evaluated factors of GHG emissions in major countries under Annex I of the Kyoto Protocol and in the industries of the Keidanren’s Voluntary Action Plan on the Environment through decomposition analysis. The energy intensity improvement rate can be often observed to have a strong relationship with the economic growth rate. It is important to achieve stable improvement of energy and CO2 intensity without economic conditions. This paper analyzed the correlation between annual changes in per-capita GDP and energy intensity of GDP as well as the intensity improvement rate. The energy intensity of Japan was not been improved greatly after 1990 compared with the improvements of many other Annex I countries. However, the improvements of Japan were achieved without strong correlation with per-capita GDP, while large improvements in some countries were induced by the improvement of per-capita GDP. The energy intensity of some of the business associations participating in the Keidanren’s Action Plan was worsened between 1997 and 2010/2012. According to the analyses of this study, the worsening of the intensity in the most of the associations were strongly affected by the decrease in economic activities.
