The Difference In The Impact Of Different Urbanization Development Levels On CO 2 Emissions

Greenhouse gases produced by human activities have exacerbated global warming,which has seriously threatened the environment in which we live,and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions,represented by carbon dioxide,has already reached a consensus in the international community.More and more countries began to take the low-carbon economy as a new strategic high ground and an opportunity to seek economic sustainable development.Chinese government always adhere to the "common but differentiated principle",and actively assume international and domestic carbon emission reduction responsibility,through setting a series of carbon emission reduction targets to implement low-carbon development.At the Paris Climate Change Conference in December 2015,the Chinese government renewed its commitment "reach the peak of carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 and 60%to 65%reduction in CO2 emissions per unit of GDP in 2005",which was not only driving the global carbon reduction process but also brought a greater pressure on carbon emission reduction.China’s urbanization has experienced the process of low starting point and high speed,thus making some remarkable results.The population urbanization rate increased from 17.9%in 1978 to 54.77%in 2014,an average annual increase of 1.02 percentage points,and urban resident population increased from 170 million to 749 million.At the same time,infrastructure construction,construction,transportation and living expenses and so on increased substantially urban energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions has become increasingly prominent.China’s territory is vast and different provinces and cities have a large gap in the levels of urbanization development ecological modernization theory and urban environmental transformation theory tell us that the energy and environmental issues faced by different urbanization development stage are not the same.Under the background of accelerating urbanization and reducing CO2 emissions in China,analyzing the main factors of CO2 emission under different urbanization development levels and then putting forward the differentiated emission reduction strategies are are the ultimate goal of this paper.Therefore,the author uses 30 provinces and cities in China as the object of study and build an urbanization development level index system including the economic urbanization,population urbanization,social urbanization and space urbanization,combined with previous literature and the impact mechanism of urbanization on CO2 emissions.On this basis,China’s 30 provinces are divided into high,relatively-high,medium and low urbanization development level by principal component analysis method.Finally,four groups of panel regression analysis were used to obtain the influencing factors of CO2 emissions under different urbanization development levels.The study found that,urban built area/urban construction land area is the leading CO2 emission factors in low and medium urbanization development level,while urban residents per capita consumption and population urbanization rate are the dominant CO2 emission factors in relatively-high and high urbanization development level;Per capita GDP,the proportion of secondary and tertiary industries,the per capita consumption of urban residents,the population urbanization rate and the proportion of employed population in secondary and tertiary industries are the common factors of CO2 emission under different urbanization development levels,while the impacts of urban built area/urban construction land area,number of private cars per capita and per capita park green space on CO2 emissions at different urbanization development levels are significantly different.Accordingly,common carbon reduction strategy and differentiated carbon reduction strategies are proposed finally;From the relationship between the level of urbanization and the average CO2 emission per capita,the mean value of per capita CO2 emissions has increase year by year in the same urbanization development level.Among different urbanization levels,the mean value of per capita CO2 emissions increases generally with the development of urbanization level.