The Complexity of Urban CO2 Emission Network: An Exploration of the Yangtze River Middle Reaches Megalopolis, China

With their focus on human production and consumption activities, cities incur massive energy consumption and CO2 emissions. An intercity connection is a typical complex system in which the interaction between cities is crucial for developing low-carbon outputs within the urban agglomeration. This pa...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zuo Zhang, Zhe Wang, Wei Zhang, Yanzhong Liu, Zhi Li, Lin Huang
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Wiley 2021-01-01
Series:Complexity
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2021/6612363
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:With their focus on human production and consumption activities, cities incur massive energy consumption and CO2 emissions. An intercity connection is a typical complex system in which the interaction between cities is crucial for developing low-carbon outputs within the urban agglomeration. This paper presents the construction of the CO2 emission network of an urban agglomeration in the Yangtze River middle reaches megalopolis, based on the gravity model. Combined with social network analysis (SNA), a multilevel analysis framework is proposed to deal with the complexity, spatiality, and visualization of the CO2 emission network with reference to the network features, structural equivalence, and the rich-club phenomenon. The following results emerged: firstly, the spatial structure of the CO2 emissions was characterized by low robustness and compactness, indicating disunity among the studied cities. Secondly, there was found to be a strong correlation between regionalism and intercity connections, with geographically close cities playing a similar role in the network. Thirdly, the “rich-club” cities, including Wuhan, Changsha, Xiaogan, and Zhuzhou, dominated the connections, covering more than 87.1% of the network in the Yangtze River Middle Reaches Megalopolis.
ISSN:1076-2787
1099-0526