An Empirical Study On The Impact Of Urbanization On Carbon Dioxide Emissions

The commitment to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in all countries(regions) reminds us to re-examine whether our current model of economic development can meet the requirements of sustainable development under the new situation.Fully studying the relationship between urbanization and carbon emissions can provide a reference for future carbon emissions control.This paper argues that the process of urbanization is reflected in two aspects.One is the large-scale flows of rural population to cities at the macro-level,that is,the increase of urbanization rate.The other is the change of urban features at the microscopic level in urban development.So this paper conducts two empirical studies on these two problems respectively.Using a panel data of 98 countries(regions) over the period of 1990–2014,this paper analyze the impact of urbanization rate on carbon dioxide emissions.We employ POLS method,two-way fixed effects model and FGLS method based on the extended STIRPAT theoretical frameworks.We divide the total carbon dioxide emissions in a country(region) into four parts according to different sectors,and 98 countries(regions) into four income levels.The results show that there is a significant positive correlation between urbanization rate and overall carbon dioxide emissions.With the increase of income level,the impact firstly increases and then decreases,showing an "inverted U-shaped" curve.From the view of different sectors,the rising urbanization rate has the greatest impact on the carbon emissions of the power sector,followed by the transportation sector.In all these four sectors,the marginal carbon emissions of urbanization rates rise with the growth of regional income.GDP per capita,age structure and population size all have positive correlation with overall and sub-sector emissions,but the impact varies according to income and sector.To explore the impact of urban-level urban features on carbon dioxide emissions,this paper takes 289 prefecture-level cities in China as the research object and selects the relevant socio-economic data from 2013 for empirical analysis.The results show that the area of municipal districts and the population density all have significant positive correlations with carbon dioxide emissions.The increase of1% area of municipal districts will increase carbon dioxide emissions by 0.6%;and the increase of 1% of the population density of municipal districts will increase carbon dioxide emissions by 0.9%.The urban compactness has non-significant negative effect on carbon dioxide emissions and the land use diversity also has non-significant positive effect on carbon dioxide emissions.