Temporal Evolution Pathway and Forecasting of Non‐Fossil Energy Consumption and Carbon Emission Under China's Carbon Peak Target: A Markov Switching <scp>AR</scp> and <scp>RNN</scp> Approach

ABSTRACT To fulfil the commitments of the Paris Agreement, China will strive to achieve carbon peak (CP) by 2030. It is necessary to identify the evolution characteristics of China's carbon emissions and provide a scientific path prediction for the formulation of reasonable emission reduction policies and measures. This study summarises and predicts the pathway of China's carbon peak (CP) using carbon emission intensity (CEI) and the percentage of non‐fossil energy consumption (NEC) as indicators, and combining MSIH(3)‐AR(2) model and recurrent neural network. The results show that: (1) China's CEI experiences a ‘low decline regime’ (LDR), a ‘medium decline regime’ (MDR) and a ‘high decline regime’ (HDR), while the share of NEC goes through a ‘low fluctuation regime’ (LFR), a ‘medium growth regime’ (MGR) and a ‘high growth regime’ (HGR). (2) For CEI, the switching probability from MDR to the HDR is 74.88%, illustrating a substantial improvement. For NEC, the switching probability from MGR to HGR is 28.92%, but the probability of returning to MGR is 61.76%, indicating an adjustment. (3) By 2030, CEI will reach 0.9896 tons/100 million CNY, decreased by 66.35% compared with 2005. While the percentage of NEC will rise to 26.61%. Based on these, policy suggestions such as strengthening the top‐level design, upgrading energy mix and accelerating green technological changes are proposed to break the bottlenecks of reaching CP and further zero carbon goal. This study is expected to provide theoretical support and empirical evidence for the achievement CP in China, and to provide empirical references for promoting the ‘dual carbon’ process in other countries.