scholarly journals Examining the Impacts of Economic, Social, and Environmental Factors on the Relationship between Urbanization and CO2 Emissions

Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (21) ◽  
pp. 7430
Author(s):  
Yang Ding ◽  
Qing Yang ◽  
Lanjuan Cao

This study examines the relationship between urbanization, economic growth, industrial transformation, technological change, public services, demographical change, urban and natural environmental changes, and carbon emissions using a dataset of 182 prefecture-level cities in China between 2001 and 2010. Specifically, this paper differs from previous studies in two aspects. First, the extant literature has focused on how economic processes accompanying rapid urbanization affect carbon emissions in urban areas but gives little attention to the other dimensions of urbanization, including social and environmental changes, which may have important effects on carbon emissions. We assessed the effects of 17 key processes accompanying urbanization in a full range of economic, social, and environmental dimensions on carbon dioxide emissions in urban areas. The results showed that social processes accompanied with rapid urbanization had distinct effects on carbon emissions, compared to economic and environmental processes. Specifically, improvement in public services, indicated by education and cultural developments, reduces the increase in carbon emissions during urbanization, while economic growth and urban construction reinforces the growth in carbon emissions. Second, we examined the impact of various urbanization processes on carbon dioxide emissions using a unique dataset of 182 prefecture-level cities that covers a wide span of regions in China. The results of our analyses on the city level have important implications for the formulation of comprehensive policies aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emission in urban areas, focusing on different urbanization processes in economic, social, and environmental phases.

Author(s):  
Yu Kun Wang ◽  
Xiaoyong Zhang

Carbon emissions exacerbate global climate change. Transitioning away from coal is a cost-effective path to a low-carbon economy. Although many articles have considered the issue of manufacturers' production and emission of pollution. Few papers have discussed the impact of environmental tax and fuel tax on the cost of environmental degradation. This paper seeks to fill this gap by developing a theoretical model to discuss the relationship between environmental pollution and economic growth. Furthermore, in order to support the theoretical results and testify the relationship between carbon emissions and taxation, we take South Africa as a case for discussing the effect of environmental taxation and fuel levy on firms' carbon emissions. We show that the impact of environmental taxes on carbon dioxide emissions is greater than that of fuel taxes on carbon dioxide emissions. In addition, we find that the GDP level of South Africa is on the left of the inflection points of Kuznets Curve. In other words, the current growth of South Africa's economy is at the cost of worsening the environmental degradation.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (5) ◽  
pp. e0251816
Author(s):  
Deng Jie Long ◽  
Li Tang

With the change of social economic system and the rapid growth of agricultural economy in China, the amount of agricultural energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions has increased dramatically. Based on the estimation of agricultural carbon dioxide emissions from 1991 to 2018 in China, this paper uses EKC model to analyze economic growth and agricultural carbon dioxide emissions. The Kaya method is used to decompose the factors affecting agricultural carbon dioxide emissions. The experimental results show that there is a co-integration relationship between economic growth and the total intensity of agricultural carbon emissions, and between economic growth and the intensity of carbon emissions caused by five types of carbon sources: fertilizer, pesticide, agricultural film, agricultural diesel oil and tillage. Economic growth is the main driving factor of agricultural carbon dioxide emissions. In addition, technological progress has a strong role in promoting carbon emission reduction, but it has a certain randomness. However, the impact of energy consumption structure and population size on carbon emissions is not obvious.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (13) ◽  
pp. 7148
Author(s):  
Wenjie Zhang ◽  
Mingyong Hong ◽  
Juan Li ◽  
Fuhong Li

The implementation of green finance is a powerful measure to promote global carbon emissions reduction that has been highly valued by academic circles in recent years. However, the role of green credit in carbon emissions reduction in China is still lacking testing. Using a set of panel data including 30 provinces and cities, this study focused on the impact of green credit on carbon dioxide emissions in China from 2006 to 2016. The empirical results indicated that green credit has a significantly negative effect on carbon dioxide emissions intensity. Furthermore, after the mechanism examination, we found that the promotion impacts of green credit on industrial structure upgrading and technological innovation are two effective channels to help reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Heterogeneity analysis found that there are regional differences in the effect of green credit. In the western and northeastern regions, the effect of green credit is invalid. Quantile regression results implied that the greater the carbon emissions intensity, the better the effect of green credit. Finally, a further discussion revealed there exists a nonlinear correlation between green credit and carbon dioxide emissions intensity. These findings suggest that the core measures to promote carbon emission reduction in China are to continue to expand the scale of green credit, increase the technology R&D investment of enterprises, and to vigorously develop the tertiary industry.


2013 ◽  
Vol 448-453 ◽  
pp. 4544-4547
Author(s):  
Di Wang ◽  
Guo Zhong Sun

China's CO2 emissions from 1990 to 2010 were calculated as well as two economical models were established, and the relationship between carbon dioxide emissions, economic growth, foreign direct investment (FDI) and export trade was analyzed. The result shows that the relations between China's carbon emissions and GDP showing the "N" type. Economic growth and export trade had significantly promoted China's carbon emissions, while the relations between FDI and China's carbon emissions are not significant. During the past years, exports have played an important role in promoting china's economic development. However, the main exporting industries are energy and emission intensive, which reveals disadvantage for carbon reduction. To reverse the negative impact of the export to china's carbon dioxide emissions, export structure should be optimized, and the outdated technology, equipment and products should be eliminated, while energy-conservative and environmental friendly industries should be promoted.


2020 ◽  
pp. 713-727
Author(s):  
Xiaohui Wang, Xin Zhang

The study on the relationship between investment in environmental governance, carbon emission and economic growth is helpful for the relevant government departments to coordinate the influence among them when formulating the policies of reducing emission and conserving energy, so as to take the comparative advantages of various factors and promote the benign interaction between economic development and environmental governance. In this paper, the data of Per capita GDP, per capita investment in environmental governance and per capita CARBON dioxide emissions in China from 2000 to 2019 are selected as the research basis, and variables are studied by means of Granger causality and impulse response function. As shown in the results, there is a single Granger relationship between investment in environmental governance and carbon emissions, that is, the increase of investment in environmental governance leads to the reduction of carbon emissions. The influence of economic growth on environmental governance investment is small, but in the long term, it can restrain the growth of carbon emissions. Investment in environmental governance can promote economic growth and stimulate a reduction in the emissions in the short term; Economic growth was hindered by the emissions in the long term and fail to stimulate increased investment in environmental governance. Based on these findings, this paper proposes policy Suggestions for optimizing the structure of environmental governance investment, improving the carbon emission monitoring and response mechanism, and strengthening the technological level of energy conservation and emission reduction.


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