Study on the Influencing Factors of Carbon Emissions in China's Air Cargo Transportation Industry

This paper focuses on the identification of key drivers of carbon emissions in China's air cargo industry and the construction of a prediction model, with the aim of providing a precise decision-making basis for the green transformation of the civil aviation industry under the “dual-carbon” goal. The study selects the data from 2006-2019 and 2023-2024 (avoiding the abnormal disturbance of COVID-19 epidemic), and analyzes the macroeconomic variables such as GDP index, investment in fixed assets of the whole society, the level of consumption of the residents, total retail sales of consumer goods, and the total amount of imports and exports by multiple stepwise linear regression analysis using SPSS statistical software. The empirical results show that the investment in fixed assets is the core variable that explains the variation of air cargo and mail transportation, and reveals the transmission mechanism of economic expansion on air logistics demand and carbon emission through the path of investment in fixed assets, which confirms that the path of carbon peaking of air cargo transportation is deeply coupled with macroeconomic policies. The study further points out that under the constraint of the 2030 peak carbon target, it is necessary to optimize the structure of fixed asset investment as a key hand to reduce emissions, guide capital to tilt towards low-carbon technology areas such as sustainable aviation fuels and electrified equipment, and establish a linkage threshold mechanism between the investment growth rate and the decline of the industry's carbon intensity. This study provides a quantitative analysis framework for the formulation of precise emission reduction policies for the air cargo industry, but in the future, further integration of energy consumption data is needed to construct a direct carbon emission prediction model, and scenario analysis is introduced to assess the policy effects of different carbon neutralization paths.