“…Our assessment is based on a decomposition of the Kaya identity, a top-down model, which allows us to gain insight into all sectors and assess emissions at a broader economic level. Earlier studies using a decomposition analysis of historical consumption-based emissions found that investment effects on emissions in developing countries (mostly in China, and also in Mexico, India and Indonesia) are larger than those in developed countries (Liu et al, 2019), but that this influence has weakened in China in recent years, due to the reduction in government subsidies (Mi et al, 2017;Meng et al, 2019;Wang et al, 2020). Based on these past trends, we show that, over the coming decades, although China and others (e.g., Australia and Russia) see declining infrastructure expenditure, the persistence of historical trends in the evolution of consumption pattern (a gradual increase in the shares of construction and investment) contributes to emission increases in major emerging nations (e.g., Brazil, Mexico and India) in a significant way (Fig.…”