Regional disparities and evolution trend of city-level carbon emission intensity in China

Carbon emission intensity (CEI) plays a crucial role in promoting urban green economy transition, which has attracted strong attention from scholars and society. However, the regional disparities and evolution trend of city-level CEI have not been yet fully investigated. This paper addresses this gap by exploring the regional disparities and evolution trend of China's city-level CEI from 2000 to 2017, based on nighttime light data and the methods of Dagum Gini coefficient, exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA), kernel density estimation (KDE), and spatial Markov chains. The research results revealed that China's city-level CEI showed an obvious decline trend from 3.677 kgCO2/USD in 2000 to 1.696 kgCO2/USD in 2017. There are evident regional disparities of China's city-level CEI, and inter-regional disparities are the main source. China's city-level CEI shows a positive spatial autocorrelation, and there are obvious differences in the distribution rules of cities with different spatial agglomeration forms. Moreover, China's city-level CEI presents obvious polarization and siphon effect. This paper therefore formulates the differentiated urban green economy transition strategies based on the regional disparities and evolution trend of China's city-level CEI.