Can Low-carbon Pilot Projects Under New Urbanization Improve The Level Of Urban Environmental Governance

After decades of development,China has made rapid progress At the same time,we should also see that behind the remarkable achievements of reform and opening up,the ecological environment has been destroyed,and various urban diseases have emerged in the process of urbanization.All these are neglected development problems and symptoms of unbalanced and disharmonious development.More importantly,urbanization should focus on "beauty",adhere to the concept of people-oriented and sustainable development,and make up for the remaining problems caused by traditional urbanization.Compared with the traditional mode of urbanization,the new type of urbanization embodies the scientific concept of comprehensive,coordinated and sustainable development.It aims to develop an intensive economy and build a harmonious society.In order to gradually promote the new urbanization,China has carried out a large number of urban pilot projects.In this paper,the existing development modes of new towns and cities are summarized into four main development modes,which are characterized by science and innovation,human nature and social harmony,information and intelligence,and intensive and ecological development.In the connotation of new urbanization,ecological and environmental friendliness is a major goal.The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of new urbanization construction on urban environmental pollution control and its impact mechanism.Low-carbon pilot cities are selected as the focus of this study.Based on the panel data of 281 prefecture-level cities in China from 2003 to 2016,this paper mainly conducts empirical research in four aspects:1.Establish a comprehensive environmental pollution control level index by selecting multiple pollution control indicators;2.DID method and PSM-DID method were used to evaluate the impact of the construction of low-carbon pilot cities on the level of environmental pollution control;3.Adopt the three-step method to verify the mechanism and path of the impact of low-carbon pilot city construction on pollution control level;4.Explore whether the construction of low-carbon pilot cities with different characteristics has significantly different impacts on environmental governance and whether the construction of low-carbon pilot cities has spillover effects.This paper draws the following conclusions: 1.The construction of low-carbon pilot cities can improve the level of urban environmental pollution control by about 3.3%,which indicates that compared with traditional urbanization,the construction of low-carbon pilot cities in new urbanization can effectively improve the level of environmental pollution control;2.The construction of low-carbon pilot cities mainly improves the level of urban environmental governance through industrial structure path and technological innovation path,while the publicity and education path is not significant.;3.From the perspective of urban development stage,compared with developing low-carbon cities,the construction of leading low-carbon pilot cities has a greater and more significant positive effect on the level of environmental governance,which is about 0.5 percentage point higher;4.Based on the heterogeneity analysis of economic radiation capacity,low-carbon cities with economic radiation capacity have less impact on environmental governance than low-carbon cities without economic radiation capacity,and the construction of low-carbon pilot cities has no significant spillover effect.The research conclusions of this paper have important policy significance: 1.The government should rely on low-carbon green industry to realize industrial transformation and upgrading,give full play to the positive effect of industrial optimization on the level of environmental pollution control,and promote balanced economic and ecological development;2.The government should set up a platform for innovation research and development,improve the incentive mechanism for innovation research and development,and on the basis of technological progress,increase the proportion of high-tech industries and promote the transformation of industries to environmental friendliness;3.When examining and approving low-carbon pilot cities,the government should take into account the differences in the development stage of cities and try to choose cities in the post-industrial stage;4.Small and medium-sized cities in the stage of industrialization should make full use of the dividends of the new urbanization development on the basis of maintaining their original advantages,and make targeted innovations to adapt to the new urbanization model of their own urban development characteristics,so as to maximize the efficiency of urban governance.The main innovation points of this paper are in the three aspects: 1.Innovation from the perspective of research.Different from previous studies on low-carbon pilot cities,this paper takes low-carbon cities as a development model of new urbanization and discusses the impact of new urban construction on environmental governance;2.empirical index innovation.This paper USES the construction of multi-dimensional indicators of environmental governance level to evaluate the impact of low-carbon city construction on environmental governance;3.Innovation of research content.Through mechanism analysis,this paper clarifies the internal ways that new urbanization affects environmental governance.