Smart pathways of cities reducing carbon emissions in the context of China

Abstract

Extensive carbon emission has been widely considered as a major contributor to the severe issue of climate change, and China has been the largest carbon emitter in the world. In order to mitigate the problem of enormous carbon emission, China has launched three batches of low-carbon pilot cities and there are substantial experiences generated from the practice of low carbon city. These lessons learned from these experiences provide very important references on how to promote low carbon city development in specific cities. Therefore, this study aims at analyzing the diverse smart pathways of pilot low-carbon cities in China for providing effective insights for decision makers of cities which are going to develop low-carbon city. Firstly, this study proposes a framework for classifying cities into four types including resources cities, industrial cities, integrated cities and tourist cities. And then 34 sample Chinese low-carbon pilot cities are classified into the four groups by applying the proposed framework. Cities in different groups have different context or features and in the same group are more similar with each other. Then, the practices of low-carbon city development of these 34 sample cities are collected. And the analysis on the smart pathways of cities across different groups is conducted. This study can provide good reference for decision makers of cities when formulating effective urban development plans according to identifying which group they belong to.