Re-examining environmental Kuznets curve for China's city-level carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions

Chinese central government promised to reduce its CO₂ emissions intensity by 40%–45% by 2020 compared to the level of 2005. However, with limited knowledge on local CO₂ emissions, the government could hardly decompose its mitigation plan to local administrative divisions. In this paper, we first interpolate the provincial CO₂ emissions to prefectural cities with a combination of areal interpolation method and DMSP/OLS nighttime light data. Then, we test the EKC hypothesis with this city-level data and spatial econometric modeling. This research reveals an uneven landscape of CO₂ emissions at both provincial and city scales, suggesting a differentiated decomposition of the mitigation target in China. The city-level monotonic increasing relationship between GDP per capita and CO₂ emissions per capita confirmed by our EKC test indicates that CO₂ emissions would not decrease automatically as income increases. To that end, actions such as improving the energy efficiency and implementing carbon taxes should be taken to reduce CO₂ emissions.