Carbon neutrality based on vegetation carbon sequestration for China's cities and counties: Trend, inequality and driver

Abstract

While China pledged to achieve carbon neutrality (CN) by 2060, the regional heterogeneity of CN received a limited attention, causing biased Pareto optimality when facilitating regional CN policy. This study focused on regional heterogeneity of CN based on vegetation carbon sequestration from perspectives of convergence, driver, and inequality across nearly all China's cities and counties during 2000–2017. Eleven city clubs and eighteen county clubs of CN index (CNI) were identified to be convergent in the long run. Decomposition results indicated that economic scale was the largest driver contributing to the increase in CNI, and the driver pattern changed in the post-Kyoto era, where technological level was an increasingly important contributor to improve CN for cities. Inequality analysis showed that Gini coefficients of CNI were declining for cities and counties, where individual between-group and within-group subcomponents nexus diversified, such as inverted U-shaped and linear relationships. The results from this study can facilitate CN-related policies, especially those associated with regional heterogeneity.