Research On Low-carbon City Construction Mode Selection And Its Support Elements

Mankind productivity has been through geometrical growth since human society came into the industrial civilization from the agricultural civilization. Natural curiosity and their various needs driving forward the development of human society. When the Urbanization become the main mode of development of human society and this development mode will remain the case in the foreseeable future, Our great era present us with a new proposition-Sustainable Development.Under the background of Sustainable Development, a series of concepts as low-carbon city, green city etc. with core of low-carbon economy have been proposed and actively practiced by the governments of the world. Although countries in the world have a shared responsibility of the global greenhouse gas emissions, Carbon reduction duty has become a constraint of the developing countries for their self-development and this is also a important reason why the rich and poor gap between developing countries and developed countries is widen in such an international social order which can't be absolutely fair.Since the reform and opening up policy has been carried out in1980s China's economy, society and any other aspects has undergone enormous changes people's living standards improve year by year and the nation's economic strength is greatly increased. Under the background of globalization, accompany with the economy strength level up, China's international status has gradually improved, take more international responsibility as made extraordinary efforts in greenhouse gas emission reduction and promised to reduce the carbon emission per GDP in2020by40%-45%lower than in2005.Face with a huge domestic population and employment pressure, to maintain a steady economic growth is the primary task of China. In the balance of carbon emission reduction and economic development issue China is difficult to choose. Therefore, choose a sustainable way that take low-carbon economy as the core and low-carbon city as the mean to stimulate social development is a correct decision based on the current international and domestic environment and China's own fundamental strength. Without significant innovation in traditional carbon emissions research into a fixed pattern, we adopt a new research method in this study by Comprehensive calculation of carbon emission than the traditional one to study embodied carbon emissions in China and its impact on China's low-carbon city construction.The basic ideas of this paper are as follows:1.Redefine a series of important concepts as Carbon Emission, Embodied Carbon Emission, Low-Carbon Urbanization, Urban Carbon Reduction etc.2.Use a new method to calculate the embodied carbon emission based on I-O model with Input-output table data.3. Decompose the factors driving the embodied carbon change in China with Kaya identical equation and LMDI decomposition method.4. Propose some advices according to the conclusion combined with theoretical analysis of China's low-carbon city construction support elements and framework.This study is divided into six chapters; the basic structure and content are as follows:Chapter1is the introduction. In this chapter, the significance of this research, the purpose of this research, methods will be used are described in detail, Reviewed and combed many research results in recent decades about carbon emission, embodied carbon emission, sustainable development, and low-carbon economy to lay a solid foundation for the following research.Chapter2is about the theoretical basis of the low-carbon urban development. In this chapter we try to explore the strong evidence in former classical theories to support today's low-carbon urban construction, to find the possibility and necessity of constructing the low-carbon city, developing the low-carbon economy and taking the road of sustainable development in China from a variety of disciplines. These theories include:low-carbon economy theory, ecological industry theory, demographic theory, culture theory and architectural theory.Chapter3introduced the I-O model which is the main tool in study of the embodied carbon emission, and set a specific model based on China's domestic situation. We calculated the embodied carbon emission in China based the input-output table data2007, and the conclusion is that based on the2007calculation the construction industry is the highest embodied carbon emission industry, and as the terminal of the industry chain the embodied carbon emission of service industry (merged) ranked the third place in all sectors. Besides, we also compared the proportion of each sector's embodied carbon emission and the proportion of each sector's output, and concluded that the construction industry is the most diseconomy one, although the service industry's embodied carbon emission proportion is high, its output is also very considerable. Finally we calculated the embodied carbon emissions for Sichuan Province in2007and the conclusion is basically the same with the national situation.In Chapter4we used Kaya equation and LMDI decomposition method to study the factors that affect the embodied carbon emission change in China with input-output table data available from1990to2007. We divided those factors into two level8effects:The economies of scale effect, the industrial structure effect, the economic efficiency effect, effect of progress of production methods in the production level and population scale effect, population structure effect, living standard effect, effect of progress of lifestyle in the life aspect. Finally, we conclude as follow:The effect of production progress and lifestyle progress are the main factors to drive the change of the embodied carbon emissions in China on their own level.On the base of the previous analyze, we proposed five supporting elements need to pay attention to which support the construction of a low-carbon city in China in Chapter5. These are:industry support, population support, facilities support, culture support and Institutional support. Among those support factors the industry support is the most basic one; Population support the necessary condition and facilities are the outward manifestation and material basis; The Cultural Support is a soft and invisible mechanism; institutional support is the ultimate support factor of all, it provide guidance and constraints to all low-carbon city construction activities, as well as certain rights given to the city constructors and inhabitants. In the rest of this part we compared "low-carbon urbanization" and "Urban de-carbonization" in detail which may have the same meaning in Chinese words and usually be misunderstood from one to another, and finally we conclude that for the sake of the inner and outer consequences China should choose the combine pattern with two patterns mentioned above.Chapter6concluded the paper on the basis of conclusion, made policy recommendations, summarized the inadequacies of the study, and anticipated the outlook for future research in the field simultaneously.In summary, we used a more convincing data analysis method after the Rigorous theoretical study to illustrate the embodied carbon emission status in China theoretically and empirically. A description of the relationship between China's low-carbon urban construction path of sustainable development and the embodied carbon emission was given at the same time, and there is a conclusion that besides the continuation of energy conservation and adjust the old industrial structure to be low-carbon there are a lot of other things to do such as embodied carbon emission monitor and calculation to get fully information about the carbon emission in urban area and provide more relational institutions to cover all aspects of the low-carbon city construction issues without any institution waste. Finally, we believe that culture can be more important in the low-carbon city construction process and it's better for us to absorb the advanced culture from other nations and dig out the outstanding culture of our own nation, pass the cultural essence to the population affect their living and productivity behavior, and eventually reach the low-energy consume and low-carbon emission goals of the sustainable development of the cities.