A city perspective on the arduous task of emission-growth balance: decoupling and decomposition analysis in Chinese cities

Decoupling economic growth and carbon emissions is essential to a sustainable high-quality development. As a small unit of the engine of development, more research has begun to focus on city-level issues. In order to fill the gaps in the decoupling research at the city level covering the whole nationwide, this paper applied the bottom-up method to calculate 282 cities' carbon emissions according to China's city-level panel data of terminal energy consumption, and combined Tapio decoupling with LMDI decomposition model to analyze cities' decoupling status and its driving factors. The results reflect that (1) strong decoupling, weak decoupling, expansive coupling, and expansive negative decoupling were the main decoupling states of Chinese cities and the strong decoupling cities were mainly clustered in the southwestern area. (2) The COE effect, ES effect, and EI effect were negative in most cities, promoting the realization of strong decoupling in most cities, but the contribution of COE effect and ES effect to the decoupling effect was relatively small. (3) The nature differences of ES effect and EI effect were the crucial reason for the significant differences in the degree of decoupling among different types of cities, especially the differences of EI effect in both SD cities and WD cities during 2005 to 2010 and 2010 to 2015. Based on the findings, some common but differentiated recommendations are provided for promoting the decarbonization of the economy in Chinese cities.