Abstract
Abstract
As the world’s largest carbon emitter, China is under great pressure to cut down carbon emissions. Understanding the evolution of carbon emissions across Chinese cities is important for policymakers when allocating carbon emission quota among these cities. This paper draws upon the Open-source Data Inventory for Anthropogenic CO2 to calculate city-level per capita carbon emissions in China from 2001 to 2016. Overall, we find that per capita carbon emissions of Chinese cities have been generally on the rise during the 2001–2016 period. However, there has been on average a modest decline in per capita carbon emissions of cities in China’s Yangtze River Delta region and Pearl River Delta region from 2011 to 2016, after a remarkable increase during the 2001–2011 period. Besides, the average north-south gap has been enlarged, with northern cities having a relatively higher level of per capita carbon emissions.
China has become the world’s largest carbon emitter since 2005 due to its unprecedented process of industrialization and urbanization. In 2016, China accounted for about 28% of global carbon emissions, more than the sum of the US and the European Union (Le Quéré et al., 2018). While the Chinese government has made great efforts to cut down carbon emissions, it is anticipated that emissions will continue to grow for the next decade and might reach a national peak by approximately 2030.
Understanding the evolution of carbon emissions across Chinese cities is important for policymakers when allocating carbon emission quotas among these cities. However, city-level carbon emission data are usually missing because the National Bureau of Statistics of China only releases energy consumption data at the national and provincial level. In light of this, a recent study by Wang and Li (2017) has estimated and mapped city-level carbon emissions of China in 2013 by using night light satellite data. Still, relatively little is known about the spatiotemporal distribution pattern of city-level carbon emissions over the years.
This paper draws upon the Open-source Data Inventory for Anthropogenic CO2 (ODIAC) to calculate city-level carbon emissions of China from 2001 to 2016. The dataset is a global high-resolution (about 1km) emission dataset for fossil-fuel carbon emissions and has been widely used by the international carbon research community (Oda et al., 2018). One of the advantages of using this dataset is that we can trace back the historical data on carbon emissions in a consistent manner. In contrast to many studies that have mainly investigated the absolute amount of carbon emissions, this graphic focuses on the indicator of per capita carbon emissions which takes into account the population differences across Chinese cities. This indicator also helps reflect the extent to which people share the same right of using earth resources. Given that statistical data on permanent population of Chinese cities is missing for most years during the study period, we retrieve city-level permanent population data from the LandScan™ High Resolution Global Population Dataset (Bhaduri et al., 2002; Li and Liu, 2018; Li et al., 2019).
Figures 1 to 4 show the cartograms of per capita carbon emissions of Chinese cities in 2001, 2006, 2011 and 2016 respectively. In each cartogram, the area of a city is proportional to its per capita carbon emissions. Note that we use the same legend across these figures to make them comparable. Overall, the per capita carbon emissions of Chinese cities have been generally on the rise during the 2001–2016 period. Furthermore, the average north-south gap has been enlarged, with northern cities having a relatively higher level of per capita carbon emissions. The highest level of per capita carbon emissions appears in cities in northwestern areas (mainly in Inner Mongolia province and Xinjiang province) which are China’s major coal-production base with relatively smaller population. Cities in China’s Yangtze River Delta region and Pearl River Delta region also have a relatively higher level of per capita carbon emissions, partly because of their rapid process of industrialization and urbanization. However, there has been on average a modest decline in per capita carbon emissions in these cities from 2011 to 2016, after a remarkable increase during the 2001–2011 period. This suggests that Chinese cities with relatively developed economies might be in a transition towards low-carbon development. Future studies could analyze how this transition is related with knowledge production and flows within certain regions which has been investigated by some recent studies (Li and Phelps, 2017, 2018, 2019).
Per capita carbon emissions of Chinese cities in 2001.
Per capita carbon emissions of Chinese cities in 2006.
Per capita carbon emissions of Chinese cities in 2011.
Per capita carbon emissions of Chinese cities in 2016.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.