Research of the carbon governance of global low carbon technology financing under the carbon neutrality constraints

Climate financing supported by the developed countries has been considered the key issue for the developing countries to realize their mitigation and adaption goals. This paper built an integrated assessment model named CIECIA-TD-F by introducing an international climate finance and investment module into the CIECIA-TD model. Based on this model, we designed carbon neutrality pathways of countries according to their national determined contributions (NDCs) and carbon neutrality targets, and studied the effects of implementation of global low carbon technology financing and its policy combinations with technology sharing. Their effects on surface temperature mitigation, low carbon technology progress, and carbon neutrality cost reduction under the carbon neutrality constraints were studied by scenario simulation, Furthermore, their global carbon governance meanings were discussed. The results show that the current carbon neutrality pledges are insufficient for the 1.5° C mitigation target, indicating the climate ambitions of countries should be improved immediately for achieving the climate protection goals. Under the current pledged scale of global climate financing from the developed to developing countries, the low carbon technology financing can neither promote the low carbon technology progress in the developing countries effectively nor reduce their carbon neutrality costs significantly. Expanding financing scale radically after 2020 will improve low carbon technology levels of the developing countries, and reduce their carbon neutrality costs. However, it hurts the economic growth and technological innovations of those developed countries, and obstructs the R&D of advanced low carbon technologies in turn. While increasing financing scale to 500 billion USD per year since 2030, the economic losses of the developed countries increase to more than 2%, and their low carbon technology levels decrease by more than 15% compared with their baseline levels. Combining low carbon technology sharing with technology financing can significantly promote the transfer and deployment of advanced low carbon technologies and effectively reduce the carbon neutrality costs, and thus is more economically feasible than implementing low carbon technology financing policies solely. In the policy combination scenarios, the low carbon technology levels of all countries increase compared to the baseline, and the economic losses of the donors are limited to less than 2%. The combination of technology financing and sharing benefits both developed and developing countries, and thus is worth attention in the global climate governance and cooperation in future.