Abstract
An accurate evaluation of carbon emission efficiency (CEE) at the city level can provide guidelines for understanding low carbon performance, which is crucial to achieving dual carbon targets. Existing CEE studies focused on national, industrial, and provincial scales while neglecting the city level and failing to consider competing relationships among decision-making units in their measurement models. To fill these gaps, this paper introduces the data envelopment analysis game cross-efficiency model (DEA-GCE) to measure urban CEE performance and compares it with the traditional Super-SBM model using the data from 283 Chinese cities between 2006 and 2019. The results show that (1) the DEA-GCE method provided more intensive and stable results. (2) Overall CEE of Chinese cities declined slightly amidst fluctuations during this period. (3) CEE in cities exhibits spatial clustering characteristics. CEE performance in Northeast China has improved, while CEE in Northwest China continues to lag behind. This study introduced an innovative method for calculating urban CEE and conducted an empirical study of 283 Chinese cities, which has implications for formulation of emission reduction policies.
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Data Availability
The datasets used and analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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Funding
This research work is supported by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (No. 2022M722895), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. “72101237” and No. “72101238”).
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Jinfa Li: Conceptualization, Supervision, Project administration, Writing—review and editing. Jiahui Guo: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Writing—original draft. Xiaoyun Du: Visualization, Validation, Writing—review and editing. Hongbin Jiang: Data collection and editing.
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Li, J., Guo, J., Du, X. et al. A DEA game cross-efficiency based improved method for measuring urban carbon emission efficiency in China. Environ Sci Pollut Res 31, 22087–22101 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-024-32539-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-024-32539-z