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Spatiotemporal analysis of national carbon emission and regional carbon simulation in China

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Abstract

Land use and land cover (LULC) will cause large flows of carbon sources and sinks. As the world’s largest carbon emitter with a complicated LULC, China’s carbon emissions have profound implications for its ecological environment and future development. In this paper, we account for the land-use changes and carbon emissions of 30 Chinese provinces and cities in China from 2000 to 2020. Furthermore, the spatial correlation of carbon emissions among the study areas is explored. Four typical regions with spatial association (Beijing, Hebei, Sichuan, and Anhui) are selected, and their land-use change trends in 2025 and 2030 are simulated to predict the total carbon emissions in the future. The results show that the distribution of land-use in China is mainly cultivated and woodland, but the growth of urban built-up (UBL) land area indirectly leads to the continuous increase of carbon emissions. Total carbon emissions have increased over the past two decades, albeit at a slower growth rate, with some provinces experiencing no further growth. In the typical regional carbon emission simulation, it is found that the carbon emissions of the four provinces would show a downward trend in the future. The main reason is the reduction in indirect carbon emissions from fossil energy in UBL, while the other part is the influx of carbon sinks due to grassland, woodland, etc. We recommended that future carbon reduction measures should focus and prioritize controlling fossil energy and mitigating carbon emissions from UBL. Simultaneously, the significant contribution of forests and other land types as carbon sinks should be acknowledged to better implement China’s carbon neutral commitment.

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Data availability

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Funding

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant 41971313); the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant 42271411); Research Project on Monitoring and Early Warning Technologies for Implementation of Land Use Planning in Guangzhou City (2020B0101130009); Open Fund of Key Laboratory of Urban Land Resources Monitoring and Simulation, Ministry of Natural Resources [No. KF-2022-07-021].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Geosciences and Info-Physics, Central South University, Changsha, 410083, China

    Yuxiang Cheng, Yuqi Tang, Bin Zhou & Huihui Feng

  2. Key Laboratory of Spatio-Temporal Information and Intelligent Services, Ministry of Natural Resources, Changsha, 410083, China

    Yuqi Tang & Bin Zhou

  3. Key Laboratory of Urban Land Resources Monitoring and Simulation, Ministry of Natural Resources, Shenzhen, 518000, China

    Huihui Feng

Authors
  1. Yuxiang Cheng
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  2. Yuqi Tang
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  3. Bin Zhou
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Contributions

Yuxiang Cheng: Writing original draft, conceptualization, funding acquisition, project administration, formal analysis, and supervision. Yuqi Tang: writing original draft, methodology, literature review, data curation, visualization, and supervision. Bin Zou: writing, review, editing, visualization, and validation. Huihui Feng: resources, data curation, and supervision.

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Correspondence to Yuqi Tang.

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Cheng, Y., Tang, Y., Zhou, B. et al. Spatiotemporal analysis of national carbon emission and regional carbon simulation in China. Environ Sci Pollut Res 31, 10702–10716 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-31817-6

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