Abstract: “One Belt & One Road” (B&R) strategy which was firstly proposed by China, can be considered as the provision of public goods to the world. What is more, green and environmental protection requirements have been one of the most important content. Recent studies about this strategy have tended to focus on the strategic and institutional frame design by qualitative discussion, and almost no discussion about carbon emission and environmental issues. Based on the differences of low-carbon economy in B&R countries, how to choose the investment projects and countries will be very important to make “B&R” strategy green. Thus, this paper constructs a carbon emission driving factor decomposition model by extending the classic Kaya model. Then, we analyze the drivers of the carbon emission in 50 countries along the Belt and Road from 1992 to 2011 by adopting the approaches of the ordinary regression analysis and quantile regression. At last, we evaluate the historical contribution and potential of those countries to carbon emission reduction by constructing indicators. The results of mean regression analysis show that the effects of population, the urbanization level, the proportion of industrial output, the rate of non-renewable energy and the per capita GDP on the increase of the carbon emission successively weaken. From the quantile regression analysis, we find that the increase of population and industrialization degree has the greatest effect on the carbon emission for medium-emission countries; GDP per capita has the minimal impact on high emission countries. Emission contribution analysis shows that the carbon emission output effects, carbon emission reduction effects and decoupling index in those countries are all less than 1, the carbon emission reduction effect is less than the output effect index and decoupling indicators in most years are even less than 0. This indicates that the relation between economics and carbon emission in those countries do not have any decoupling effect. Judging from the carbon emission reduction potential analysis, we find that 28% of those countries have not reached the world average reduction level, and most countries would have great potential for emission reduction in the future. Thus, more investment in those countries will be helpful for a green “B&R” strategy.

Key words: One Belt One Road, carbon emissions, potential of emission reduction