Research on Low-Carbon City Construction and Development Strategy—A Case Study of Shenzhen ()
1. Introduction
As the concept of low-carbon economy and low-carbon city has gained increasing awareness under the settings of global-warming, many countries and international organizations have been dedicating to advocating lowcarbon life philosophy, exploring low-carbon operation mechanism and setting low-carbon city as the target. Since China is in the progressing development period of urbanization and industrialization, it has to confront with various conflicts while sharing favorable economic success.
Being the core of regional social and economic development, city’s growth in industry brings huge amount of emission of green-house gas which becomes an increasing serious problem. Among them, the issue of city resource consumption and environment deterioration has got wide concerns for its significance for life quality and future city. Therefore, it is urgent to reduce city resource consumption and gas emission, and to introduce the idea of low-carbon city to the city planning, construction and development which is profound to adjust the upgrading of industry construction and to improve production and management efficiency.
2. Research Review and Development Tendency of Low-Carbon City
So far, there have been no definite and unified criteria for the definition of low-carbon city. The World Wide Fund for Nature defines low-carbon city as the place which can keep resource consumption and carbon dioxide emission at a low level in the rapid economic development. While the Climate Group thinks it is a city that advocates lowcarbon economy to realize low-carbon emission even zero-carbon emission. There are many Chinese scholars striving on the study of low-carbon city. For example, Gu yongxin and Li Hongxin define low-carbon city as the city where the government chooses low-carbon development as development pattern and direction, and the citizens take low-carbon life as ideology and behavior rule, and the management set low-carbon society as construction model and target [1]. Fu Yun regards low-carbon city as an operation model of low-carbon economy by innovating low-carbon technology, changing life style and reducing urban greenhouse gas emission [2]. Jin Shi addresses low-carbon city development should remain resource consumption and carbon dioxide emission at a low level during the fast pace of economy development [3]. It is concluded that low-carbon city is a new channel of the coordination between city’s economic development and environmental protection. Many countries have carried out the movement of low-carbon city construction to extend the new idea of low-carbon city. For example, low-carbon community model in Denmark; British urban practice to cope with climate change; Sweden’s sustainable plan; Japan’s low-carbon society practice plan and America’s low-carbon city practice proposal etc. [4]. British Beddington zero energy community and zero-emission community of Sun City, the Netherlands abroad, are two of the more well-known low-carbon model communities: 1) Known as Britain’s most innovative residential project “Beddington zero energy consumption Community” Sutton, near London, adhering to the “modern life without sacrificing comfort” concept, so as to become the community more environmentally friendly, more energy efficient [5]. 2) the Netherlands Sun City zero-emission community make extensive use of solar power technology in the roof and exterior walls of buildings to install solar panels to generate electricity. Generating capacity is not only to meet the electricity needs of the community, but also 44% of the electricity can be delivered to the grid [6]. Foreign scholars also carried out a series of studies on low-carbon cities: Wynn Chi and Nguyen Cam paint out that the concept of low-carbon cities derives from the climate change awareness and the urgent quest to reduce, if not neutralise, anthropogenic-induced carbon emission to the atmosphere [7]. Wei-Ting Chen and Chi-Min Shu think that CO2 reduction is very important for low carbon community and they take Tannan as a case study [8]. but also many foreign scholars select one city as a case study to explore how to build a low-carbon cities. Maribel Feliciano and David C. Prosperi take Florida as an example and provide some pith for the discussion of planning for low carbon cities [9]. Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai and other cities have been studied by scholrs.
At present, there are 287 prefectural-level cities in China. Till 2008, there exist 13 cities with population over 4 million, 28 cities with 2 to 4 million people, 81 cities with 100 to 200 million people. According to the criteria of megalopolis by the United States, a city with more than 1 million people, 43% of Chinese cities belong to megalopolis. The statistics in 2008 indicates that GDP of prefectural-level cities has reached RMB 18627.95 billion which occupies 62% in the total sum of China GDP. City’s role as regional center is increasingly significant. However, cities have shown its weakness in the process of rapid urbanization. For instance, total income of average citizen ranks 210 in 2008, coal and steel consumption is No.1 in the world, oil consumption is No.5 all over the world [10]. Moreover, dominant role of Second industry, especially high-consumed industry leads to the increase of resource consumption which finally results in serious environmental problem. What’s more, the lower proportion of the third industry in urban economy, the more unreasonable urban economic structure, as well as the more highly-consumed industries are, the greater stress from urban resource will be. In addition, there are also the severe pollution of urban air pollution, deterioration of water quality, traffic noise and urban solid trash increasing [11]. The facts prove that present economy growth pattern of China city still greatly depends on manufacture centered with resource consumption. In order to realize the upgrading of urban industrial structure, energy saving and emission reduction, it is necessary to increase the proportion of the 3rd industry-based service economy in urban economy, and to set the target of constructing low-carbon city in city planning.
3. Profile of Studied Area
3.1. Introduction of Economic Development of Shenzhen
As special district benefiting from China’s reform and opening policy, Shenzhen’s GDP reached RMB 820.131 76 in 2009, and increased 4167 times comparing with RMB 0.196 38 ever since [12]. Now everybody admits that it is a brilliant economy success. Though this city has created the miracle of “Shenzhen speed”, its industry mainly depends on extensive economic growth model in raw material processing. What’s more, 30-year fast development has substituted for gradual development which causes problems of population explosion, resource shortage, environmental pollution etc. At present, Shenzhen is at the crucial stage of transformation of economic structure and growth model. It must be confronting with the challenges and opportunities as well. Therefore, the question of how to turn Shenzhen’s economy from traditional extensive mode to intensive one, from quantity expansion to quality growth has become a challenge for all the people in Shenzhen City.
3.2. Resource and Environment Development in Shenzhen
The result from Shenzhen Bureau of Statistics indicates that the population of residents has increased from 314 thousand to 8.912 3 million during 1979-2009 with average speed of 11.8%. In 2009, power consumption of the city increased by 208% since ten years ago, and water supply goes up by 63%. What’s more, large population pushes resource and raw material consumption to a higher level [13].With the development of 2nd industry, high-costly energy industry grows as well, total energy consumption rises regularly every year. Present industry situation of Shenzhen and China’s resource structure has determined coal-centered resource consumption pattern, that is, it will produce 4.12 tons of CO2 by burning one ton of coal, which will produce more CO2 by 30% than those produced from petrol and 70% from natural gas [14]. In 2009, raw coal consumption was 2.62106292 tons which was No. 1 in main resource consumption list. From 1979 to 2009, Shenzhen’s total output value has increased by 4175%, whilst the proportion of environment protection has only gone up 53% [12]. It is obvious that there is a regular increase in resource consumption and CO2 emission which results in severe environmental problem during the process of fast urbanization of Shenzhen City.
In 2008, Development and Reform Committee drew up “Reform and Planning plan in Zhujing Delta” which addresses the importance of energy saving and environment protection. As a key city in Zhujiang Delta, Shenzhen should set a good example in this work. Therefore, in a government report of 2010, it proposed to speed up the construction of national eco-cultural demonstrative city and national low-carbon eco-demonstrative city in five years. It also planed to promote energy-saving and emission-reduction in public organization, and to advocate low-carbon life-style to enhance eco-cultural awareness. In this way, it is able to construct a low-carbon city free of constraints from resource and protection which matters much for Shenzhen.
4. Design of Evaluation Indicator System of Low-Carbon City Development Potential
Since constructing low-carbon economy evaluation index is an important stage for building low-carbon city, it is an initial step and significant presupposition to choose an appropriate index to evaluate city’s potential to develop low-carbon economy. What’s more, it is also an important step to transfer theory to practical level, which matters the establishment of low-carbon city and channel choice of city low-carbon economic development.
According to “Evaluation System of Low-carbon City in China”, this system refers that it should be composed of 10 indexes, such as city low-carbon development planning index, city green land coverage index, low-carbon travel index, city air quality index, city direct carbonreduction index etc. [15]. Xue Meng think the establishment of low-carbon city evaluation index should focus on three aspects, that is, production channel, coordination degree between carbon-emission reduction quantity and economy development, government policy enforcement [16]; Xu Hong has designed a city sustainable development evaluation index system which is made up of 3 levels, 4 systems and 23 specific indexes [17]. Shao Chaofeng has adopted the model of drive-stress-state-influence-response and constructed the system of 5 categories and 13 elements [18].
Referring to Shenzhen’s reality, starting from three levels of economy, low-carbon and social development, the authors chose 14 elements in Shenzhen low-carbon city development potential evaluation index system (see Table 1). What’s more, the authors analyzed and evaluated Shenzhen’s potential on constructing low-carbon city by referring to the statistics from 2005-2009 and adopting main-element analysis and level analysis.
Table 1. Shenzhen evaluation indicator system of low-carbon city.
4.1. Evaluation of Economy Development of Shenzhen
According to the above evaluation indicator system and statistics of 2005-2009 in Shenzhen, Table 2 comes into being as follows.
There comes a relevant matrix as Table 3 with correlation analysis:
The above correlated matrix indicates the correlation coefficients of X1 and X3, X1and X2, X1 and X4, X3 and X4 are 0.973, 0.871, 0.919, 0.981 with the absolute value more than 0.8, which shows high correlation degree. Therefore, we can have main elements analysis on these repetitive indexes to figure out various principal component factors representing comprehensive situation of economic development level.
As indicated in Table 4, the value of KMO is 0.627, which can be evaluated with principal component analysis.
Table 5 shows that the contribution rate of the first