A dimensional perspective-based analysis on the practice of low carbon city in China

Abstract

The rapid urbanization process in China has resulted in a large number of carbon emissions. Practicing low-carbon city (LCC) strategy is considered as a key pathway towards carbon reduction, and a dimensional analysis on LCC performance can identify weak areas of a city's low-carbon development, from which tailored LCC measures can be developed and adopted to better guide LCC practice. Existing studies tend to pay more attention upon the overall performance analysis of LCC practice, with less attention upon dimensional examination of LCC performance. This study therefore aims to examine the LCC practice in China from a dimensional perspective, thus the research questions are designed as how to evaluate and enhance the LCC performance in China from a dimensional perspective. Five specific dimensions are identified to investigate LCC performance via literature review and experts discussion, for which evaluation indicators are established to measure the dimensional LCC performance and entropy weight method and Topsis method are used to calculate the dimensional LCC performance score. An empirical study is conducted to identify the weak area of LCC performance in 35 sample Chinese cities. The main findings are as follows. Optimization of industrial structure is the short area of cities in Northeast and Western China in terms of their low-carbon performance; adjusting of energy structure and increasing carbon sink level are the weak areas of Northern Chinese cities; whilst improving energy efficiency is the shortcoming of cities in Central and Western China. Besides, those cities who are not under the LCC pilot scheme should improve their low carbon management ability. This study enriches the research discipline of low-carbon city development and provides a basis for examining and enhancing LCC performance across the whole country of China.