Examining the determinants and the spatial nexus of city-level CO2 emissions in China: A dynamic spatial panel analysis of China's cities

Abstract

Abstract: China, now the world's top CO2 emitter, is facing increasingly pressure to instigate energy-saving and emission-reduction measures. As a result, great attention is being paid to the driving forces behind CO2 emissions in China; literature has to date, however, tended to exclude the city level, due to a scarcity of energy statistics at that scale. Using GIS technology and dynamic spatial panel data models, and aided by spatiotemporal modeling that integrates remote sensing data and statistical data, this study identifies the determinates and the spatial nexus of CO2 emissions at China's city level. The results show that the CO2 emissions of all of China's cities increased between 1992 and 2013, with the highest CO2 emission levels occurring in eastern, rather than western or central, China. In addition, an obvious spatial agglomeration effect was observed in city-level CO2 emissions, highlighting the influence cities exert on their neighbors. Our empirical results also emphasize the influence that factors such as economic growth, population, the industrialization level, capital investment, and population density all exert in relation to raising CO2 emissions; as such, the study found little evidence in support of the EKC hypothesis. These results, further, imply that if China persists in its current development pattern, the estimated factors will inevitably lead to increased CO2 emissions in the long term. Road density and the traffic coupling factor were, in contrast, both found to exert strong influences to the mitigation of CO2 emissions—as such, improving the coupling degree between the urban spatial structure of a city and its traffic organization could play an important role in reducing CO2 emissions. Our findings merit attention from Chinese policy makers as they shed new light on the path toward developing low-carbon cities.