Research on stage characteristics of low carbon city

Developing low-carbon city (LCC) is an important strategy for achieving carbon emission reduction. However, cities present different development stages and characteristics. Different from previous studies on dividing development stages by a single economic-index, this study develops an economic development stage framework by incorporating carbon emission characteristics with associating to Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC), and analyze the performance of characteristics impact on carbon emission in different stages. The Kaya Identity is adopted to decompose emission characteristics into energy structure (ES), energy intensity (EI), economic output (EO), industrial structure (IS) and population scale (P). Results show that these five emission characteristics have different performances in different development stages, simply imitating or copying existing experience of low-carbon city (LCC) will not be effective. The findings not only provide decision-makers with scientific basis for taking effective measures to reduce carbon emission, but also provide cities internationally a new approach for establishing LCC through focusing on different development stages.