Low carbon development and local sustainability from a carbon balance perspective

Urbanization raises great challenges for global sustainability and natural resources. With the increasing carbon constraints in the context of climate change, the capacity of carbon sequestration becomes an important resource to address regional sustainable development. However, there is still a lack of an integrated methodology to evaluate urban sustainability within a local urbanization process from a carbon cycle perspective. This paper presents a new way of understanding regional sustainability, which assumes that the status of carbon balance is closely related to low carbon management and local sustainability. The concept of carbon neutral coefficient (CNC) is proposed based on the estimation of carbon emissions and sinks, which emphasizes the fundamental role of carbon sinks in achieving low carbon development and improving local sustainability. Taking Chongming Island (China), the largest alluvial island in the world, as a case study, carbon emissions and sinks are calculated respectively according to an integrated carbon inventory and local coefficients. From 2005–2013, a temporal-spatial variation of CNC was observed on Chongming Island, owing to the different growth rate of carbon emissions and sinks. Furthermore, a spatial variation of change of CNC was detected, caused by the imbalanced spatial distribution of carbon emissions and sinks. Remote Sensing based analysis shows that the change of land use and cover which was induced by human activities can greatly influence local carbon balance and sustainable development. It is also found that the CNC results can help explaining the positive impacts and limitations of ecological environment policies in Chongming Island during the same period. Consequently, the approach of carbon balance analysis serves as an additional tool for monitoring policy effectiveness, which contributes to the debate of sustainable carbon management for local sustainable development.