Urban low-carbon governance zoning coupled with urban attributes and spatial networks: Theoretical framework and practical path

Carbon emissions from land-use change have accounted for approximately one-third of global carbon emissions since the 21st century. As an effective planning tool for climate change mitigation at the city scale, low-carbon zoning governance has become a hot topic in the global academic community. However, despite increasingly relevant research, this field suffers from weak foundations, single research perspectives, and limited methods. To address these issues, we proposed a new theoretical framework for urban low-carbon governance zoning that couples urban attributes and spatial association characteristics. China's Yangtze River Delta (YRD) region was selected as a case study, and a complete technical path integrating multidisciplinary methods was designed for implementing this framework. Cities in the YRD were categorized into nine low-carbon governance zones based on their internal attributes and position in the carbon emission network. All zones showed obvious "club" characteristics and were highly spatially clustered. Unlike previous single-view zoning methods, the comprehensive zoning method proposed herein considers a city's socio-economic characteristics and position in regional cooperation. As such, this approach can better solve the problem of urban heterogeneity and improve the universality of low-carbon planning schemes. Based on the results of this study, we propose low-carbon strategies covering four planning types according to the specific characteristics of different regions, which is conducive to accelerating the process of urban carbon neutrality.