The impact of urbanization on GHG emissions in China: The role of population density

Urbanization directly drives rural to urban population migration and indirectly causes west to east migration in China, two phenomena that may significantly impact China's greenhouse gas emissions given its huge population and vast difference between the west rural and east urban areas. We analyzed these two phenomena by turning emissions into a per capita term, and extending the impact from the traditional urbanization rate effect to include population density effect. Our results show that population density has actually been the dominant demographic player in changing per capita emissions for the past two decades in China, and its elasticity changed from positive in economically less-developed provinces to negative for the developed provinces. This study therefore provides a new perspective in the study of the relationship between urbanization and greenhouse gas emissions, and our results indicate that population density change should be taken into account to accurately assess the impact of urbanization. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.