Impact of population and economic growth on carbon emissions in Taiwan using an analytic tool STIRPAT

Carbon emission has increasingly become an issue of global concern because of climate change. Unfortunately, Taiwan was listed as top 20 countries of carbon emission in 2014. In order to provide appropriate measures to control carbon emission, it appears that there is an urgent need to address how such factors as population and economic growth impact the emission of carbon dioxide in any developing countries. In addition to total population, both the percentages of population living in urban area (i.e., urbanization percentage), and non-dependent population may also serve as limiting factors. On the other hand, the total energy-driven gross domestic production (GDP) and the percentage of GDP generated by the manufacturing industries are assessed to see their respective degree of impact on carbon emission. Therefore, based on the past national data in the period 1990–2014 in Taiwan, an analytic tool of Stochastic Impacts by Regression on Population, Affluence and Technology (STIRPAT) was employed to see how well those aforementioned factors can describe their individual potential impact on global warming, which is measured by the total amount of carbon emission into the atmosphere. Seven scenarios of STIRPAT model were proposed and tested statistically for the significance of each proposed model. As a result, two models were suggested to predict the impact of carbon emission due to population and economic growth by the year 2025 in Taiwan.