• Energy Research

Cities offer unique strategies to reduce fossil fuel use through the exchange of energy and materials across homes, businesses, infrastructure and industries co-located in urban areas. However, the large-scale impact of such strategies has not been quantified. Using new models and data sets representing 637 Chinese cities, we find that such cross-sectoral strategies—enabled by compact urban design and circular economy policies—contribute an additional 15%–36% to national CO2 mitigation, compared to conventional single-sector strategies. As a co-benefit, ∼25,500 to ∼57,500 deaths annually are avoided from air pollution reduction. The benefits are highly variable across cities, ranging from <1%–37% for CO2 emission reduction and <1%–47% for avoided premature deaths. These results, using multi-scale, multi-sector physical systems modelling, identify cities with high carbon and health co-benefit potential and show that urban–industrial symbiosis is a significant carbon mitigation strategy, achievable with a combination of existing and advanced technologies in diverse city types. The use of cross-sectoral strategies, such as the exchange of waste energy through co-location of industry, business and residential areas, is shown to be effective for greenhouse gas and particulate mitigation in this study of 637 Chinese cities.

ABSTRACTWith massive urbanization and infrastructure investments occurring in China, understanding GHG emissions from infrastructure use in small and large Chinese cities with different administrative levels is important for building future low-carbon cities. This paper identifies diverse data sources to assess GHG emission from community-wide infrastructure footprints (CIF) in four Chinese cities of varying population (1 to 20 million people) and administrative levels: Yixing, Qinhuangdao, Xiamen and Beijing. CIF addresses seven infrastructure sectors providing energy (fuels/coal), electricity, water supply and wastewater treatment, transportation, municipal waste management, construction materials, and food to support urban activities. Industrial energy use dominates the infrastructure GHG CIF in all four cities, ranging from 76% of total CIF in Yixing to 30% in Beijing, followed by residential energy use (6–13%), transportation (4–12%), commercial energy use (2–25%), food (6–11%), cement use (3–8%) and...