Suchergebnisse

AbstractDevelopment zones constitute a special type of place‐based policy that has been implemented worldwide. As an essential economic development engine, Chinese National Economic and Technological Development Zones (NETDZs) are perceived as a successful example. However, few studies have looked into the channel effects at work in development zones concerning industrialization and urbanization, despite the crucial nature of such effects with regard to sustainable development of development zones. Following a brief description of NETDZs and their theoretical mechanisms with urban economic performance, industrialization, and urbanization, this study used a simultaneous equation model to generate empirical evidence of the impact of the establishment of NETDZs on urban economic performance and its channel effects through industrialization and urbanization. The results confirm that NETDZs exerts a positive and significant impact on urban economic performance, and NETDZs also show indirect influence in urban growth through urbanization. Although significant and positive intermediation of industrialization remains invalid, foreign direct investment and investment in fixed assets are still crucial in Chinese industrialization. Both industrialization and urbanization play an important role in Chinese urban economic development. Meanwhile, compared with eastern regions more influenced by urbanization, industrialization still acts as a major impetus in inland China.

As the world's largest carbon emitter, China is under great pressure to cut down carbon emissions. Understanding the evolution of carbon emissions across Chinese cities is important for policymakers when allocating carbon emission quota among these cities. This paper draws upon the Open-source Data Inventory for Anthropogenic CO2 to calculate city-level per capita carbon emissions in China from 2001 to 2016. Overall, we find that per capita carbon emissions of Chinese cities have been generally on the rise during the 2001–2016 period. However, there has been on average a modest decline in per capita carbon emissions of cities in China's Yangtze River Delta region and Pearl River Delta region from 2011 to 2016, after a remarkable increase during the 2001–2011 period. Besides, the average north-south gap has been enlarged, with northern cities having a relatively higher level of per capita carbon emissions.

Abstract
Accelerated global urban expansion not only directly occupies surrounding ecosystems, but also induces cascading losses of natural vegetation elsewhere through cropland displacement. Yet how such effects alter the net primary productivity (NPP) worldwide remains unclear. Here, we quantified the direct and cascading impacts of global urban expansion on terrestrial NPP from 1992 to 2020, and projected the impacts under the shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) framework by 2100. We found that global urban expansion caused a cascading loss of 7.2 to 44.6 Tg C/year of terrestrial NPP in the historical period (1992-2020), accounting for 3-20% of the total direct NPP loss. Instead, our projections indicate that during 2020-2100, mainly due to the increased relocation of displaced croplands to low-productive ecosystems, the cascading impacts gradually change from negative to positive, leading to a net NPP increase. Such an increase may offset up to 7% of the total direct NPP loss, better balancing crop compensation with NPP maintenance. Our findings highlight the unexpected large cascading impacts of urban expansion on the carbon cycle and stress the importance of regulating land transitions to curtail land use emissions.