Visually Exploring the Carbon Emissions in China from a Multi-Temporal Scale Perspective: A Case Study on the Province-Level CO2 Emissions

Global warming has become one of the most serious challenges that all countries in the world are facing together. One important factor which results in this challenge is the emissions of carbon, e.g., carbon dioxide (CO
2
). As one of the major countries which has the largest carbon emissions, China has been positively seeking effective ways to solve this worldwide problem. Motivated by this, research on carbon emissions has been a main focus in various domains. Among the existing research, however, few has been conducted specifically from a multi-temporal scale perspective. Therefore, in this paper, we aim to explore the carbon emissions from a multi-temporal scale using the Continuous Triangular Model (CTM) by taking China as an example. Specifically, the data of province-level CO
2
emissions are adopted for case study, and the explorations are achieved mainly through visualizations. The visualizations are the various CTM diagrams derived based on two indices (i.e., the total CO
2
emissions per year and the growth rate of the total CO
2
emissions per year, respectively) at two spatial levels (i.e., province-level and region-level, respectively). For each CTM diagram, corresponding information at all temporal scales is included. The case study demonstrates that several meaningful information can be found through visual explorations, which might be useful to related departments for decision making.