Low-carbon transformation of China’s cities: evaluation and spatiotemporal pattern evolution

The challenges of global warming and the rapid and considerable growth of carbon emissions have attracted enormous attention from the government and society, highlighting the urgency of promoting regional low-carbon transformation, particularly in developing countries. This study focuses on China, the largest developing country, constructing an index system to evaluate cities’ low-carbon transformation and quantifying the index for 209 Chinese prefecture-level cities. This study then examines the spatiotemporal pattern evolution of Chinese cities’ low-carbon transformation and uses geographically and temporally weighted regression to investigate the influencing factors. The relevant results are threefold. (1) From 2011 to 2019, the index rose rapidly, and the eastern region experienced the strongest effect. (2) Chinese cities’ transformation exhibits obvious regional agglomeration characteristics. (3) Population density, per capita foreign direct investment (FDI), the low-carbon pilot policy, and per capita fixed asset investment generally have positive impacts, while resource-based cities, infrastructure status, and GDP target growth have overall negative effects; however, the regression coefficients of the influencing factors exhibit obvious spatial imbalance, and the dominant influencing factor of low-carbon transformation in 2011 was per capita fixed asset investment. In 2015, per capita FDI and population density were the dominant factors of central and eastern regions’ low-carbon transformation, and per capita FDI and per capita fixed asset investment were the dominant factors of low-carbon transformation in the western region. In 2019, per capita FDI and GDP target growth rate were the dominant factors in all regions.