The impact of teleconnections of built-up land on regional carbon burden under the shared socio-economic pathways

Abstract

The expansion of built-up land is currently being increasingly triggered by remote demand, thus disturbing the local process of carbon neutrality significantly. It is meaningful to understand the relations between regional development and carbon balance. To this end, we combine the multi-regional input-output model with the land system cellular automata model for potential effects (LANDSCAPE) to illustrate the impact that regional development has on the carbon burden. The results show that the expansion of built-up land results in a regional carbon burden through taking over ecological land and generating carbon emissions, to which the manufacturing industry land is the largest contributor. Regionally, developed regions exert the greatest influences on the changes in the regional carbon burden, mainly because the promotion of their development leads to the expansion of built-up land in all regions. Developing regions can impact undeveloped regions and themselves, while it is hard for undeveloped regions to change the regional carbon burden due to their low capacity to externally drive the expansion of built-up land. Meanwhile, the continuing development of developed regions exerts great pressure on carbon neutrality in both developing and undeveloped regions as they expand the “high-quality” built-up land themselves, which means that regional development may lead to changes in the carbon burden of regions which are less developed.