Coupling LSTM and CNN Neural Networks for Accurate Carbon Emission Prediction in 30 Chinese Provinces

Global warming is a major environmental issue facing humanity, and the resulting climate change has severely affected the environment and daily lives of people. China attaches great importance to and actively responds to climate change issues. In order to achieve the “dual carbon” goal, it is necessary to clearly define the emission reduction path and scientifically predict future carbon emissions, which is the basis for setting emission reduction targets. To ensure the accuracy of data, this study applies the emission coefficient method to calculate the carbon emissions from the energy consumption in 30 provinces, regions, and cities in China from 1997 to 2021. Considering the spatial correlation between different regions in China, we propose a new machine learning prediction model that incorporates spatial weighting, namely, an LSTM-CNN combination model with spatial weighting. The spatial weighting explains the spatial correlation and the combined model is used to analyze the carbon emissions in the 30 provinces, regions, and cities of China from 2022 to 2035 under different scenarios. The results show that the LSTM-CNN combination model with four convolutional layers performs the best. Compared with other models, this model has the best predictive performance, with an MAE of 8.0169, an RMSE of 11.1505, and an R2 of 0.9661 on the test set. Based on different scenario predictions, it is found that most cities can achieve carbon peaking before 2030. Some cities need to adjust their development rates based on their specific circumstances in order to achieve carbon peaking as early as possible. This study provides a research direction for deep learning time series forecasting and proposes a new predictive method for carbon emission forecasting.