Measuring Urban Low-Carbon Sustainability in Four Chinese Cities

Abstract

Practices and research on measuring traditionally urban sustainability abound, therefore the challenge now is related to how the urban carbon issues are included into current measuring methods, thus there is a need to develop methods for measuring urban low-carbon sustainability. In this paper, a simple method, which is based on low-carbon sustainability index, is developed. The overall urban low-carbon sustainability index is the weighted sum of 11 single indices, and each single index is defined as the indicator assessing the development level against the baseline. The baseline is often the criteria or the minimum requirement of low-carbon sustainability. Case studies in four Chinese cities have put this method into practice, and the results show that all four selected cities fail to pass the testing of sensible low-carbon sustainability rule and they are all in weakly low-carbon sustainable development. Although the four cities have made great progress in their capacity building on pollution control and their capacities on wastewater treatment, main pollutants’ removal and household and hazardous wastes treatment are enough to meet the needs of local development, they are all facing the great challenges on using of sustainable energy, offsetting of CO2 emissions and adoptions of nature-based solutions. The method developed by this research is a useful tool for decision makers identifying whether the local development is not on a low-carbon sustainable path.

A Literature Review of Low-Carbon Urban Tourism Indicators and Policy

“…M. Zhang et al (2021) adopted the low-carbon sustainability index method in a study of four selected Chinese cities. Results showed that all four cities failed the test for sensible low-carbon sustainability rules.…”

Fostering low-carbon industrial parks in Vietnam: establishment and application of an index system for Trang Bang Industrial Park

“…Several methods are commonly applied in weighting indicators [22]. As a simple method, this is examined and based on a low-carbon sustainability index [23]. The LCIP criteria reflect many aspects of IPs development toward LCE, and each criterion has relative importance.…”

Urban Low-Carbon Consumption Performance Assessment: A Case Study of Yangtze River Delta Cities, China

“…Equation ( 8) converts four multiplicative terms in Equation ( 7) into four additive terms, and each additive term corresponds to the contribution of each factor. Due to the absence of a unique decomposition solution for Equation (8), the average of the polar decompositions was applied to approximate the average of all decompositions [44]. Solving Equation ( 8) with the so-called polar decompositions yields:…”

“…The evaluation and decomposition of low-carbon performance is valuable as it could provide significant information for monitoring and guiding the process of low-carbon development [8,9]. In this regard, carbon emission intensity (CEI), referring to the ratio of CO 2 emissions to GDP, is an index that reflects the level of low-carbon development in a country or region [10].…”