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Transition to a low-carbon city: lessons learned from Suzhou in China

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Abstract

Climate change has become one of the most serious challenges facing humanity; developing a low-carbon economy provides new opportunities for addressing this issue. Building a low-carbon city has been pursued by people with a high degree of enthusiasm in China. Different from actions at the national level and distinct from practices of developed countries, low-carbon development in Chinese cities should be placed on diverse concerns. Taking Suzhou of Jiangsu Province of China as a case city, this paper adopts a scenario analysis approach to explore strategic focal points in the transition to a low-carbon city. Within this transition, we mainly focus on the different contributions from two factors-economic restructuring and technological upgrading. Scenario analysis results show that 1) in the case of no breakthrough technologies, it is difficult to achieve absolute emission reductions; 2) technologies involved in optimizing energy structure and improving energy efficiency of basic service sectors should be highly emphasized in local planning; 3) in comparison with technological upgrading, economic structural adjustment could be a stronger contributor to mitigation, which is one of the main differences from developed countries. However, the key issue of economic restructuring is to promote the growth of emerging low-carbon industries, which requires not only a strategic choice of new industries but also an introduction of advanced low-carbon technologies.

It is also found that establishing a local carbon emissions accounting system is a prerequisite and the first priority for realizing a low-carbon transition and government capacity buildings should be strengthened accordingly.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Environment, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Wenling Liu, Can Wang & Jining Chen

  2. Environmental Policy Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, 6706, KN, the Netherlands

    Wenling Liu & Arthur P. J. Mol

  3. The Administrative Centre for China’s Agenda 21, Beijing, 100038, China

    Xi Xie

Authors
  1. Wenling Liu
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  2. Can Wang
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  3. Xi Xie
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  4. Arthur P. J. Mol
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  5. Jining Chen
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Correspondence to Can Wang.

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Liu, W., Wang, C., Xie, X. et al. Transition to a low-carbon city: lessons learned from Suzhou in China. Front. Environ. Sci. Eng. 6, 373–386 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11783-011-0338-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11783-011-0338-y

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