Abstract: Research on the residents'carbon emissions is one of the important foundations for exploring a green and low-carbon lifestyle and for promoting the construction of beautiful China.In the past,most studies on carbon emissions focused on the industrial sector,while less on the residents'carbon emissions in the life sphere.With the growth of population,the transfer of a huge number of people from rural areas to cities and the change of residents'lifestyle,the residents'carbon emissions have changed.Based on the data of population and residential energy consumption,this study used the carbon emission coefficient method to estimate the residents'carbon emissions from 1995 to 2014.According to the dynamic changes of the total residents'carbon emissions in China,the years of 1995,2005 and 2015 were identified as the special time points in which the residents'carbon emissions in all provinces were visualized by Arcgis,and the classification was conducted using Quartile classification method to analyze the spatial differences and evolution characteristics of residents'carbon emissions in each province.The SDA structural decomposition method was used to quantitatively measure the effect of population size,population structure (urbanization) and per capita carbon emission efficiency on the change of residents'carbon emissions.The results indicated that except for Jilin,the rest of provinces showed an increasing trend for the residents'carbon emission,and the degree of regional differentiation presented the characteristics of decreasing first and then rising; the improvement of per capita carbon emission efficiency was the main factor for the increase of residents'carbon emissions,and the contribution ratio was growing year after year with the high values distributed mainly in the northern regions.The contribution of population size effect to the increase of residents'carbon emission showed a decreasing trend.The high value area was mainly distributed in the southeast,which was consistent with the densely populated area divided by Hu Huanyong line.The change of urbanization rate had a two-way effect on the change of residents'carbon emissions.The negative effect was spread to the southeast and the positive effect was risen in the north.According to the provincial differences,three categories were defined as the critical carbon emission reduction zone,key carbon emission reduction zone and carbon emission reduction focus area.For the critical emission reduction areas,the government should focus on improving the quality of urbanization and reducing per capita carbon emissions efficiency; for the key emission reduction areas,the government should actively promote the residents to use clean energy; for the carbon emission reduction focus areas,the government should foster residents'low-carbon awareness and pay attention to the problem of increasing residents' carbon emissions in urban fringe areas and urban agglomerations due to urbanization.

Key words: residents'carbon emissions, SDA structure decomposition method, regional differentiation, effect decomposition, China