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Co-benefits of transport demand reductions from compact urban development in Chinese cities

Nature Sustainability volume 7, pages 294–304 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Transport is a major contributor to carbon emissions and air pollution in China. Ongoing urbanization provides a unique opportunity for Chinese cities to abate emissions by reducing transport demand via compact urban development (CUD). Here we systematically evaluate the implications of CUD for climate, energy use, air quality and human health in 2050 China under various scenarios of alternative energy vehicle (AEV) deployment and power decarbonization. We find that, with low AEV penetration and carbon intensive power (57% coal + gas), ambitious CUD policy reduces on-road transport CO2 and NOx emissions by 97 Mt (8%) and 95 kt (7%), respectively, and avoids 25,000 premature deaths from ambient air pollution in 2050. CUD delivers less climate and air quality co-benefits as AEV penetration increases and their energy sources decarbonize, but continues to reduce vehicle energy use (up to 10%). With 100% AEV penetration, ambitious CUD policy still avoids 5,800 premature deaths by reducing non-exhaust vehicle emissions and upstream emissions. Our analysis demonstrates that CUD policy would provide considerable environmental and economic benefits in China.

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Fig. 1: Elasticities of private passenger vehicle use intensity with respect to the ‘5Ds’ of compact urban development in Chinese cities derived from a meta-analysis.
Fig. 2: On-road transport emission reductions via CUD for each Chinese province.
Fig. 3: Changes in emissions of CO2 and major air pollutants.
Fig. 4: Changes in annual average PM2.5 concentration in 2050.
Fig. 5: Co-benefits of on-road transport emission mitigation policies.

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Data availability

The Dynamic Projection model for Emissions in China (DPEC) emission inventory is available from the MEIC website (http://meicmodel.org.cn/?page_id=1917, registration required). WRF-Chem outputs and data generated in this study are publicly available on the Princeton archive at https://doi.org/10.34770/njry-v825. Data for the meta-analysis and the evaluations of health impacts and economic benefits were collected from literature and reports which are listed in the Methods and Supplementary Information. The CMIP6 emissions database is available at https://esgf-node.llnl.gov/search/input4mips/. The ECLIPSE emissions database is available at https://previous.iiasa.ac.at/web/home/research/researchPrograms/air/Global_emissions.html. The Global Burden of Disease database is available at http://ghdx.healthdata.org/. The SSP database is available at https://tntcat.iiasa.ac.at/SspDb/dsd?Action=htmlpage&page=10. The Annual Technology Baseline database is available at https://atb.nrel.gov/electricity/2021/index.

Code availability

Source codes of the WRF-Chem model utilized in this study are available at https://github.com/wrf-model/WRF/releases/tag/V3.6.1. The codes developed for data analysis in this study are available on the Princeton archive at https://doi.org/10.34770/njry-v825.

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Acknowledgements

We thank A. Ramaswami for advice on the meta-analysis of CUD literature and city categorization; S. Liu, Y. Wu and Y. Xie for advice on model simulations and the evaluation of co-benefits. We acknowledge funding from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the Prize Fellowship in the Social Sciences at Princeton University for graduate fellowship support for X.F., and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (72140003 and 72243008) for supporting D.T.

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Author notes

  1. Liqun Peng

    Present address: Energy Markets and Policy Department, Energy Technology Area, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Berkeley, CA, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    Xiangwen Fu, Liqun Peng, Mi Zhou & Denise L. Mauzerall

  2. Department of Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA

    Jing Cheng

  3. Department of Earth System Science, Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Earth System Modeling, Institute for Global Change Studies, Tsinghua University, Beijing, People’s Republic of China

    Dan Tong

  4. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    Denise L. Mauzerall

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Contributions

X.F., D.T. and D.L.M. conceived the research idea and designed the study; X.F. conducted the meta-analysis, designed the scenarios, and conducted air pollution simulations and health calculations; J.C. and D.T. conducted emission simulations; L.P. and M.Z. contributed to air quality simulations and health calculations; X.F. and D.L.M. wrote the paper with contributions from all authors.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Dan Tong or Denise L. Mauzerall.

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Fu, X., Cheng, J., Peng, L. et al. Co-benefits of transport demand reductions from compact urban development in Chinese cities. Nat Sustain 7, 294–304 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01271-4

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