Publication details
City-level climate change mitigation in China
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Science advances |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Web | http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/6/eaaq0390.full |
| Doi | http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aaq0390 |
| Keywords | climate change; carbon dioxide; economics; emission control; fossil fuels |
| Attached files | |
| Description | 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, citylevel 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, consumptionbased policiesmight allow emission reductions to be subsidized by those with greater ability to pay. In particular, sectorbased analysis of each city suggests that technological improvements could be a ractical and effectivemeans 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. |