The characteristics and drivers of China’s city-level urban-rural activity sectors’ carbon intensity gap during urban land expansion

Identifying cities’ characteristics of urban-rural overall carbon intensity imbalance is significant for the formulation and implementation of emission mitigation policies. However, existing literature focused more attention on residential sectors, ignoring other important activity sectors’ emissions. Thus, this paper estimated China’s city-level urban and rural overall carbon intensities based on all activity sectors defined by EDGAR. Subsequently, we discussed the drivers from the perspective of urban expansion. The results show that (1) China’s activity sectors in rural areas presented higher carbon intensity than those in urban areas during urban land expansion, which was mainly caused by higher rural carbon emissions density and worse rural technological level; (2) Among cities, rural areas in some developed mega cities (e.g., Shanghai and Beijing) achieved lower carbon intensity than urban areas, while those in many developing cities still suffered from worse low-carbon economy. Carbon emissions density and technological gap were typically responsible for the worse situations of those developing cities’ rural areas; (3) based on impulse responses, an increase in urban-rural technology gap significantly reduced rural areas’ carbon intensity and urban-rural carbon intensity gap in lagged periods. Especially, China’s eastern region’s urban-rural technology gap made significant contributions to improving rural technological level.