Regional carbon emission evolution mechanism and its prediction approach: a case study of Hebei, China

Industrialization and urbanization process has brought both economic development and a series of environmental problems. Hebei Province is a high haze area and one of the key areas of China’s “Blue Sky Defense” policy. As carbon emission is one of the most important factors causing haze, it is necessary to screen the influencing factors effectively to make quantitative analysis and predict carbon emissions in different degrees of coordination. Faced with the new situation of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei coordinated development and more environmental constraints, this paper designs a system for predicting carbon emissions in Hebei Province innovatively using the data during 1990–2016. In the first step, 7 influence factors are determined by “graded screening.” Then, this paper improved the traditional support vector machine (SVM) by improved gray wolf optimizer (IGWO), and established IGWO-SVM model. Finally, the carbon emissions in Hebei Province from 2017 to 2025 are predicted under three stages of different cooperative development speed of 7 influence factors by the improved intelligent algorithm model. Based on the forecasting results, this paper put forward some pertinent opinions to provide theoretical basis for formulating relevant policies on carbon emissions in Hebei Province to effectively control carbon emissions from the source.