Abstract
Urbanization is an important direction for China’s future social development and an important focus of its carbon emission reduction path. China’s current administrative management is a vertical nested structure, and the characteristics of high-scale regions have a non-negligible impact on low-scale areas. Taking the county scale of the basic unit of economic and social development as the research scale, according to the panel data of the Yangtze River Delta from 2008 to 2016, a two-level hierarchical linear model (HLM) for carbon emission intensity is constructed, especially considering the characteristics of high-scale regions (i.e., low-carbon pilot cities) at the second level, and is combined with the mediating effect test method to analyze the impact path of urban development on carbon emissions intensity. The results show that (1) there is a spatial nesting relationship between regions of different scales, and the city scale can explain 85.21% of the carbon emissions intensity, which is much higher than the county scale. (2) There is an N-shaped curve relationship between urban development and carbon emissions intensity. After considering the high-scale factor (low-carbon pilot cities) at the city scale (the second level of the HLM), if a high-scale city is a low-carbon pilot city, then improvement in the level of urbanization in the county can promote a reduction in carbon intensity. (3) The impact path of urban development ⇄ per capita gross domestic product (the proportion of secondary industry, patent application volume) → carbon emissions intensity and urban development → the proportion of tertiary industry → carbon emissions intensity is significant. However, the path of the proportion of tertiary industry → urban development → carbon emissions intensity is not significant.
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Funding
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, China (Grant No. 71673270); The Think Tank of Energy Mining Economy (2018 Project for Cultural Evolution and Creation of CUMT, China) (Grant No. 2018WHCC01); Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, China (Grant No. 2242019K40171); and China Scholarship Council Project, China (Grant No .201806425016).
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Wang, F., Wang, G., Liu, J. et al. How does urbanization affect carbon emission intensity under a hierarchical nesting structure? Empirical research on the China Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration. Environ Sci Pollut Res 26, 31770–31785 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-019-06361-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-019-06361-x