Local strategies for China's carbon mitigation: An investigation of Chinese city-level CO2 emissions

Abstract

This paper provides a systematic analysis that identifies the driving forces of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions of 286 Chinese prefecture-level cities in 2012. The regression analysis confirms the economic scale and structure effects on cities' CO2 emissions in China. If China's annual economic growth continues at the rate of 7%, CO2 emissions will increase by about 6% annually. In addition, climate conditions, urbanization and public investment in R&D are identified as important driving forces to increase the CO2 emissions of Chinese cities. While an increment of the urbanization rate by 1% increases the CO2 emissions by about 0.9%; An increase in R&D investment by 1% can help reduce CO2 emissions by 0.21%. As cities in our study vary greatly based on their industry composition, development stage and geographical location, the patterns of their CO2 emissions are also variable. Our study improves the comprehensiveness and accuracy of previous carbon accounting method by distinguishing the scope 1 and scope 2 CO2 emissions and establishing a high spatial resolution dataset of CO2 emissions (CHRED). The analysis covers almost all Chinese prefectural cities and derives useful implications for China's low carbon development.

Sustainability of Low Carbon City Initiatives in China: A Comprehensive Literature Review

“…From an LCE perspective, China's nascent manufacturing industry is the dominant driving force for energy consumption, and a significant source of pollution, carbon emissions (70%), and waste generation, which impose high costs on the economy, urban public health, and the environment [1,19]. In fact, Cai et al [30] found that economic scale and structure is the main among ten driving forces of GHG emissions in 286 prefecture cities, where a current economic trajectory of 7% GDP growth can lead to 6% growth of CO 2 emissions. Such findings support the dominance of economic strategies in LCC pilots [8,81].…”

“…This is done to build urban resilience in response to climatic stimuli [56]. Therefore, the urgent development and implementation of balanced adaptation strategies in these cities integrate climate risk management into climate-smart investment to increase the cities' adaptive capacities and improve agriculture, urban forestry, urban coastlines, water adaptation ability, and hazard mitigation [30,151]. With this being said, most of the strategies and discussions focus on mitigation [58]; and there is a lack of cohesion between mitigation and adaptation strategies, which can lead to maladaptation [30,50].…”

“…In the literature, funding is recognized as a significant barrier to the successful implementation of LCC projects [157], but there are heterogeneous sources of funding that have been identified. The government plays an instrumental role through central and local budgetary allocations, R&D, direct subsidies, incentive funds, grants, demonstration projects, taxation, and credit enhancement measures [16,30,62,94,115,159]. Further, they have also provided the appropriate resource mobilization such as establishing ideal institutional setting, defining standards, establishing viable financial policy incentives, and a transaction framework, to overcome barriers for private investments.…”

“…Local environmental pollution [6,16,[21][22][23], ecological deterioration [24], and energy shortage [21,25] have created health risks [26], have affected people's quality of life [27], and resulted in substantial economic losses [28] in megacities such as Tianjin and Beijing [29]. Concomitantly, China's cities are vulnerable to climate change impacts [17,30], as some cities have inadequate seawall defenses in low-lying areas [5], and are therefore exposed to flooding and extreme rainstorms [23]. In addition to this, some experience droughts from reduced precipitation, which can be attributed to low urban institutional capacity that creates limitations in climate governance and planning [31].…”

Structural patterns of city-level CO2 emissions in Northwest China

“…Structuring calculated CO 2 emissions over time and space in an absolute manner had increasingly been regarded as the potential approach to discontinuing CO 2 emissions (Cai et al, 2018;Liu et al, 2010;Liu et al, 2012;Tan and Lu, 2015). On one hand, structural analysis techniques (basically including structural decomposition analysis, index decomposition analysis and production-theoretical decomposition analysis) (Li et al, 2017a;Wei et al, 2017) and econometric models (Guan et al, 2018;Meng et al, 2011) have been widely employed in exploring structural patterns in the form of aggregate relative importance, without discussing the role of absolute values in absolute emissions.…”