Modeling and forecasting CO2 emissions in China and its regions using a novel ARIMA-LSTM model

Since China joined the WTO, its economy has experienced rapidly growth, resulting in significantly increase in fossil fuel consumption and corresponding rise in CO2 emissions. Currently, China is the world's largest emitter of CO2, the regional distribution is also extremely uneven. so, it is important to identify the factors influence CO2 emissions in the three regions and predict future trends based on these factors. This paper proposes 14 carbon emission factors and uses the random forest feature ranking algorithm to rank the importance of these factors in three regions. The main factors affecting CO2 emissions in each region are identified. Additionally, an ARIMA + LSTM carbon emission predict model based on the inverse error combination method is developed to address the linear and nonlinear relationships of carbon emission data. The findings suggest that the ARIMA + LSTM is more accurate in predicting the trend of CO2 emissions in China. Moreover, the ARIMA + LSTM is employed to forecast the future CO2 emission trends in China's east, central, and west regions, which can serve as a foundation for China's CO2 emission reduction initiatives.