Low carbon city (LCC) has emerged as the latest sustainable urbanism strategy in China as a response to climate change impacts. Yet, minimal scholarships have explored the sustainability of the urban planning model towards understanding the complexity of the components. Using a two-step triangulation approach, this paper presents a structured overview of the LCC initiative in China as it relates to the transition to a sustainability paradigm. The data collection approach includes a comprehensive review of 238 articles on LCC to identify and categorize LCC components. Furthermore, discourse and framing analysis was used to develop and synthesize a conceptual framework for assimilating the components into four core sustainable development principles: Integration, implementation, equity, and scalability and replicability. The results indicate that LCC development in China is bias towards economic and environmental technological innovations and strategies. Additionally, several critical sustainability issues of LCC pilots were identified. These include a lack of social equity planning concerns for the most vulnerable population, dearth of social reforms that cater to lifestyle and behavioral change, top-down planning and decision-making processes, a technocratic rationalization planning approach, inconsistent LCC targets on inter-generational justice concerns, absence of an effective national “sharing and learning” city–city network system, and several barriers to implementation. We conclude that the applied theoretical and conceptual inquiry into the field of LCC is pertinent to mitigate climate change and achieve sustainable urban development.

Sustainability of Low Carbon City Initiatives in China: A Comprehensive Literature Review

With economic development and the change of economical structure, structural evolution of economical system is an inevitable trend especially in low-carbon environment. This paper study the economical structure considering the environment, economic and social requirements in order to implement low-carbon development combining multi objective planning techniques, chance-constrained model under fuzzy random environment. Then setting energy-saving, economic growth, and laborer’s employment as the goals. After comparing the simulation result of three different schemes, we conclude that the type of economical structure directly determine carbon dioxide emissions. It will significantly reduce the energy consumption and environmental pollution through adjusting the economic structure using our model. Finally, we proposed policy recommendations according to the situation based on the research results of our model.

Yanfei Deng

Papers

Low-Carbon Economic Structure Evolution for Sustainable Development of Western China