How will Chinese cities reduce their carbon emissions? Evidence from spatial differences

Urban regions are the dominant carbon emitter in China. Although the role of urban regions is a crucial concern in peaking China’s carbon emission in 2030 or earlier, there were little focus set to the driving factors among urban regions from spatial differences. To excavate more effective abatement strategies to China’s cities, this paper improved the environmental Leontief and Ghosh input–output models and structural decomposition analysis to investigate the driving factors of the spatial differences in the CO2 emissions among four municipalities. The results released that the increasing enlarged spatial differences of CO2 emission were significant. In general, the spatial differences were dramatically influenced by the per capita final demand level from the demand perspective and the sectoral energy intensity from the supply perspective. In particular, the structural factors presented an increasingly critical role. Inspired by the results, the city level “common but distinct” policy implications were formulated.