Synergy and heterogeneity of driving factors of carbon emissions in China's energy-intensive industries

• Analyze the synergy of CO 2 emission factors of energy-intensive industries via EMD. • Synergy of CO 2 emission factors: long-term trend, short-term volatility. • Elastic coefficient model is used to reveal the heterogeneity of the 10 factors. • Six industries are divided into “stable and balanced” and “sensitive and uneven”. Carbon emission is a global problem that countries around the world are paying attention to and urgently need to be resolved. Under the requirements of China's high-quality economic development and the carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals, energy-intensive industries, as a key link in the industrial chain and the main source of China's CO 2 emissions, have attracted much attention. This paper made a statistical analysis of the scale development of six energy-intensive industries, and explored the fluctuation characteristics of their carbon emissions. The empirical mode decomposition (EMD) model was further introduced to analyze the and synergistic effect among the driving factors of carbon emission, revealing the synergistic mechanism of long-term trend and short-term volatility of factors. Then, the elastic sensitivity analysis model of carbon emissions in energy-intensive industries was constructed to study the heterogeneity of driving effects of factor indicators. From the perspective of factors driving, this article reveals the heterogeneity of the driving effects of ten key factor indicators including economic level (GDP), urbanization level (UP), industrial structure (IS), technological innovation (TI), and environmental regulation (ER); from the perspective of industry development, this paper summarized the “stable and balanced” and “sensitive and uneven” trends presented by the heterogeneity of the six energy-intensive industries. Combining the characteristics of industry emission fluctuations, driving factors’ synergies and heterogeneity, from the perspective of short-term and long-term development, four targeted emission reduction control strategies were proposed to provide reference for the low-carbon development of energy-intensive industries.