Are cities navigating towards low carbon? A comparative view of China and globe

To meet the Paris Agreement and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), global cities are facing the same task to low carbon transitions. While currently most cities choose the low carbon development paths due to their own needs, which was rarely assessed from global perspective. In this study, a unified low carbon assessment standard has been built, which covers 4 dimensions, 15 indicators, and applied for 104 global cities (60 Chinese cities) using export scoring, entropy weight and random forest methods. It’s found that Production is the most influential dimension and carbon productivity indicator weight highest. Variations in indicators of PM 2.5 , per capita GDP remain significant and continue to be a focal point for future development, particularly in cities of developing countries. Despite the overall increase of GDP in most cities, this growth has been predicated on the sacrifice of carbon emissions (38.5% of cities) and power consumption (54.8%) increase during 2015-2020. Regarding city types, service-oriented cities exhibit better performance in low-carbon assessment, but still need green energy and technology transition in service sector. While industrial cities face challenges in achieving low-carbon production and consumption, which need enhancing production efficiency, seeking non-fossil fuel replacement, and promoting circular economy in industries. Agricultural cities progress slowly in low-carbon development, which need industrial extension to high value-added service industry in order to enhance economic rewards, at the same time, maintain a better low-carbon consumption pattern. These findings provide crucial insights for cities to identify their positioning and navigate towards a low-carbon development trajectory.