Abstract
With their focus on human production and consumption activities, cities incur massive energy consumption and CO2 emissions. An intercity connection is a typical complex system in which the interaction between cities is crucial for developing low-carbon outputs within the urban agglomeration. This paper presents the construction of the CO2 emission network of an urban agglomeration in the Yangtze River middle reaches megalopolis, based on the gravity model. Combined with social network analysis (SNA), a multilevel analysis framework is proposed to deal with the complexity, spatiality, and visualization of the CO2 emission network with reference to the network features, structural equivalence, and the rich-club phenomenon. The following results emerged: firstly, the spatial structure of the CO2 emissions was characterized by low robustness and compactness, indicating disunity among the studied cities. Secondly, there was found to be a strong correlation between regionalism and intercity connections, with geographically close cities playing a similar role in the network. Thirdly, the “rich-club” cities, including Wuhan, Changsha, Xiaogan, and Zhuzhou, dominated the connections, covering more than 87.1% of the network in the Yangtze River Middle Reaches Megalopolis.
Highlights
TGiving rise to ecological and environmental changes owing to human activities, global warming has become the world’s greatest challenge, caused by the greenhouse effect. e amount of CO2 emissions has increased dramatically in China, transforming the country into the greatest contributor to energy consumption and carbon emissions in the world since joining the WTO in 2002 and accounting for about 30% globally of global emissions [1]
Based on calculating the density matrix of the spatial correlation on network plates, the image matrix was obtained and is shown in Table 1. e α-density index, that is, the average density of the entire network, is the most frequently used to determine the value of each section. It can be seen from the image matrix that the links between the plates mainly exist within the plates, while the links between the plates are not close. e CO2 emission spatial correlation network was further analyzed by dividing the positional scale and the plate’s attributes in the network, with these results presented in Table 2. e role of the plate is mainly determined by the value of the expected proportion of internal relationship and actual proportion of internal relationship
Challenged by regional emission reductions since the differences in regional economic levels and resource endowments appeared, China’s urban agglomerations have sought a coordinated low-carbon and green development path, which has become a crucial issue for regional sustainable development in China
Summary
TGiving rise to ecological and environmental changes owing to human activities, global warming has become the world’s greatest challenge, caused by the greenhouse effect. e amount of CO2 emissions has increased dramatically in China, transforming the country into the greatest contributor to energy consumption and carbon emissions in the world since joining the WTO in 2002 and accounting for about 30% globally of global emissions [1]. With a focus on two fundamental issues, the current study constructs the CO2 emission network of the Yangtze River middle reaches megalopolis and explores its complex structure, as well as how to promote integrating urban agglomeration between geographical locations and “space of flow” from a network perspective, based on the given context. Regarded as effective tools for characterizing network features, both blockmodels and the rich-club coefficient, respectively, excel at detecting network locations and identifying rich nodes, which can aid in exploring the spatial network complexity of the Yangtze River Middle Reaches Megalopolis, viewed from the perspective of subgroups and nodes. Building on integrating GIS and complex network analytical tools, a spatial network analysis framework for the Yangtze River Middle Reaches Megalopolis is here proposed to explore the complexity of the urban CO2 emission network.
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