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

Abstract

Low carbon city (LCC) has emerged as the latest sustainable urbanism strategy in China as a response to climate change impacts. Yet, minimal scholarships have explored the sustainability of the urban planning model towards understanding the complexity of the components. Using a two-step triangulation approach, this paper presents a structured overview of the LCC initiative in China as it relates to the transition to a sustainability paradigm. The data collection approach includes a comprehensive review of 238 articles on LCC to identify and categorize LCC components. Furthermore, discourse and framing analysis was used to develop and synthesize a conceptual framework for assimilating the components into four core sustainable development principles: Integration, implementation, equity, and scalability and replicability. The results indicate that LCC development in China is bias towards economic and environmental technological innovations and strategies. Additionally, several critical sustainability issues of LCC pilots were identified. These include a lack of social equity planning concerns for the most vulnerable population, dearth of social reforms that cater to lifestyle and behavioral change, top-down planning and decision-making processes, a technocratic rationalization planning approach, inconsistent LCC targets on inter-generational justice concerns, absence of an effective national "sharing and learning" city-city network system, and several barriers to implementation. We conclude that the applied theoretical and conceptual inquiry into the field of LCC is pertinent to mitigate climate change and achieve sustainable urban development.Sustainability 2019, 11, 4342 2 of 37 consumption [14][15][16][17]. This increasing energy consumption and coal dependency of the urban energy system has increased greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, as China has become the world's largest energy consumer and carbon emitter [18,19]. A recent report by the National Bureau of Statistics [20] suggests that despite a decline in GHG emissions between 2013 and 2016, emissions grew by 2.3% in 2018 due to a surge in urban construction. Therefore, after three decades of rapid physical and socio-spatial modernization, the country is facing significant negative externalities [16]. 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]. These complex and intractable problems have heralded a call for action, t...

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