This book summarizes experiences from the World Bank s activities related to low-carbon urban development in China. It highlights the need for low-carbon city development and presents details on specific sector-level experiences and lessons, a framework for action, and financing opportunities.

This book explores the relationship between urban form and greenhouse gas emissions in China, providing new insights for policy, urban planning and management. Drawing on the results of a four-year multidisciplinary research project, the book examines how factors such as urban households’ access to services and jobs, land use mixes and provision of public transport impact on greenhouse gas emissions. The authors analyse data from a wide range of sources including 4677 sample households from four major Chinese cities – Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan and Xi’an – with diverse locations, urban spatial structures and population sizes. The book explores residents’ attitudes to reducing GHG emissions and advances knowledge relating to three environmental scales – cross-metropolitan, intra-city and neighbourhood level. It also contributes to debates on low carbon policy by revealing the relevance of urban planning parameters at both the macro and micro levels. The book will be of interest to scholars in the areas of urban planning, urban management, environmental sustainability and resource utilisation, as well as urban policy makers and planners who are working toward developing low carbon, sustainable cities of the future.

As the greatest coal-producing and consuming nation in the world, China would seem an unlikely haven for wind power. Yet the country now boasts a world-class industry that promises to make low-carbon technology more affordable and available to all. Conducting an empirical study of China's remarkable transition and the possibility of replicating their model elsewhere, Joanna I. Lewis adds greater depth to a theoretical understanding of China's technological innovation systems and its current and future role in a globalized economy. Lewis focuses on China's specific methods of international technology transfer, its forms of international cooperation and competition, and its implementation of effective policies promoting the development of a home-grown industry. Just a decade ago, China maintained only a handful of operating wind turbines—all imported from Europe and the United States. Today, the country is the largest wind power market in the world, with turbines made almost exclusively in its own factories. Following this shift reveals how China's political leaders have responded to domestic energy challenges and how they may confront encroaching climate change. The nation's escalation of its wind power use also demonstrates China's ability to leapfrog to cleaner energy technologies—an option equally viable for other developing countries hoping to bypass gradual industrialization and the "technological lock-in" of hydrocarbon-intensive energy infrastructure. Though setbacks are possible, China could one day come to dominate global wind turbine sales, becoming a hub of technological innovation and a major instigator of low-carbon economic change.

Climate change is a key problem of the 21st century. China, as the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, has committed to stabilize its current emissions and dramatically increase the share of electricity production from non-fossil fuels by 2030. However, this is only a first step: in the longer term, China needs to aggressively strive to reach a goal of zero-emissions. Through detailed discussions of electricity pricing, electric vehicle policies, nuclear energy policies, and renewable energy policies, this book reviews how near-term climate and energy policies can affect long-term decarbonization pathways beyond 2030, building the foundations for decarbonization in advance of its realization. Focusing primarily on the electricity sector in China - the main battleground for decarbonization over the next century – it provides a valuable resource for researchers and policymakers, as well as energy and climate experts.

This book analyses the implications of eco-urbanism re-making for policy and practice under the transformational trends of economic decentralization and market reform in China. While the guiding themes are space, scale, and governance of cities, the book focuses on three interrelated prevailing processes of local green space reproduction, cross-scale mediation of eco-city planning ideology and mobilized social-economic-political intricacies among different countries. This book addresses the ongoing global diffusion and diversification of sustainable urbanism discourses, debates and practices to portray, evaluate, remake and implement a sustainable form of urban development, using China as a national example. As eco-city practice becomes a city-branding instrument worldwide, this new urban development vision is also well embraced by Chinese local governments. In these contexts, the Chinese government has initiated and endorsed a number of massive projects to promote green urbanism, steering urbanization onto a more sustainable trajectory. The construction of these “ecotopias” involves a multitude of processes ranging from policy transfer/mobility to institutional design, from innovation in green technologies to the promotion of green buildings, and from policy implementation to public participation.

Current societies face unprecedented risks and challenges connected to climate change. Addressing them will require fundamental transformations in the infrastructures that sustain everyday life, such as energy, water, waste and mobility. A transition to a ‘low carbon’ future implies a large scale reorganisation in the way societies produce and use energy. Cities are critical in this transition because they concentrate social and economic activities that produce climate change related emissions. At the same time, cities are increasingly recognised as sources of opportunities for climate change mitigation. Whether, how and why low carbon transitions in urban systems take place in response to climate change will therefore be decisive for the success of global mitigation efforts. As a result, climate change increasingly features as a critical issue in the management of urban infrastructure and in urbanisation policies. Cities and Low Carbon Transitions presents a ground-breaking analysis of the role of cities in low carbon socio-technical transitions. Insights from the fields of urban studies and technological transitions are combined to examine how, why and with what implications cities bring about low carbon transitions. The book outlines the key concepts underpinning theories of socio-technical transition and assesses its potential strengths and limits for understanding the social and technological responses to climate change that are emerging in cities. It draws on a diverse range of examples including world cities, ordinary cities and transition towns, from North America, Europe, South Africa and China, to provide evidence that expectations, aspirations and plans to undertake purposive socio-technical transitions are emerging in different urban contexts. This collection adds to existing literature on cities and energy transitions and introduces critical questions about power and social interests, lock-in and development trajectories, social equity and economic development, and socio-technical change in cities. The book addresses academics, policy makers, practitioners and researchers interested in the development of systemic responses in cities to curb climate change.

All societies face a key question: how to empower governments to perform essential governmental functions while constraining the arbitrary exercise of power. This balance, always in flux, is particularly fluid in today's China. This insightful book examines the changing relationship between that state and its society, as demonstrated by numerous experiments in governance at subnational levels, and explores the implications for China's future political trajectory. Ann Florini, Hairong Lai, and Yeling Tan set their analysis at the level of townships and counties, investigating the striking diversity of China's exploration into different governance tools and comparing these experiments with developments and debates elsewhere in the world. China Experiments draws on multiple cases of innovation to show how local authorities are breaking down traditional models of governance in responding to the challenges posed by the rapid transformations taking place across China's economy and society. The book thus differs from others on China that focus on dynamics taking place at the elite level in Beijing, and is unique in its broad but detailed, empirically grounded analysis. The introduction examines China's changing governance architecture and raises key overarching questions. It addresses the motivations behind the wide variety of experiments underway by which authorities are trying to adapt local governance structures to meet new demands. Chapters 2–5 then explore each type of innovation in detail, from administrative streamlining and elections to partnerships in civil society and transparency measures. Each chapter explains the importance of the experiment in terms of implications for governance and draws upon specific case studies. The final chapter considers what these growing numbers of experiments add up to, whether China is headed towards a stronger more resilient authoritarianism or evolving towards its own version of democracy, and suggests a serie