Shan, Y;
Guan, D;
Hubacek, K;
Zheng, B;
Davis, SJ;
Jia, L;
Liu, J;
... Schellnhuber, HJ; + view all
(2018)
City-level climate change mitigation in China.
Science Advances
, 4
(6)
, Article eaaq0390. 10.1126/sciadv.aaq0390.
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Abstract
As national efforts to reduce CO2 emissions intensify, policy-makers need increasingly specific, subnational information about the sources of CO2 and the potential reductions and economic implications of different possible policies. This is particularly true in China, a large and economically diverse country that has rapidly industrialized and urbanized and that has pledged under the Paris Agreement that its emissions will peak by 2030. We present new, city-level estimates of CO2 emissions for 182 Chinese cities, decomposed into 17 different fossil fuels, 46 socioeconomic sectors, and 7 industrial processes. We find that more affluent cities have systematically lower emissions per unit of gross domestic product (GDP), supported by imports from less affluent, industrial cities located nearby. In turn, clusters of industrial cities are supported by nearby centers of coal or oil extraction. Whereas policies directly targeting manufacturing and electric power infrastructure would drastically undermine the GDP of industrial cities, consumption-based policies might allow emission reductions to be subsidized by those with greater ability to pay. In particular, sector-based analysis of each city suggests that technological improvements could be a practical and effective means of reducing emissions while maintaining growth and the current economic structure and energy system. We explore city-level emission reductions under three scenarios of technological progress to show that substantial reductions (up to 31%) are possible by updating a disproportionately small fraction of existing infrastructure.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | City-level climate change mitigation in China |
| Location: | United States |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1126/sciadv.aaq0390 |
| Publisher version: | http://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aaq0390 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © 2018 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY). |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10052374 |
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