Measuring Urban Low-Carbon Sustainability in Four Chinese Cities

Mingshun Zhang, Yitong Yang and Chun Xia-Bauer
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Mingshun Zhang: Beijing Climate Change Response Research and Education Centre, Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Beijing 100044, China
Yitong Yang: Beijing Climate Change Response Research and Education Centre, Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Beijing 100044, China
Chun Xia-Bauer: Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy, 42103 Wuppertal, Germany

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 21, 1-15

Abstract: Practices and research on measuring traditionally urban sustainability abound, therefore the challenge now is related to how the urban carbon issues are included into current measuring methods, thus there is a need to develop methods for measuring urban low-carbon sustainability. In this paper, a simple method, which is based on low-carbon sustainability index, is developed. The overall urban low-carbon sustainability index is the weighted sum of 11 single indices, and each single index is defined as the indicator assessing the development level against the baseline. The baseline is often the criteria or the minimum requirement of low-carbon sustainability. Case studies in four Chinese cities have put this method into practice, and the results show that all four selected cities fail to pass the testing of sensible low-carbon sustainability rule and they are all in weakly low-carbon sustainable development. Although the four cities have made great progress in their capacity building on pollution control and their capacities on wastewater treatment, main pollutants’ removal and household and hazardous wastes treatment are enough to meet the needs of local development, they are all facing the great challenges on using of sustainable energy, offsetting of CO 2 emissions and adoptions of nature-based solutions. The method developed by this research is a useful tool for decision makers identifying whether the local development is not on a low-carbon sustainable path.

Keywords: urban sustainability; low-carbon city; urban environmental management; urban China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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