The efficient, the intensive, and the productive: insights from the urban Kaya relation

Considering their current CO2 emissions globally, the role of cities in climate change mitigation is unprecedented. Given the strong global urbanization trend, it is crucial to understand whether large urban areas are more emission efficient in comparison to smaller ones. Recent literature on urban scaling properties of emissions as a function of population size led to contradicting results and more importantly lacked an in-depth investigation of the factors leading to such scaling properties. Therefore, in analogy to the well-established Kaya Identity, we developed an urban Kaya relation to investigate different scaling properties of the indicators within the Kaya Identity for a global dataset of 61 cities. Contrary to traditional urban scaling studies which use ordinary least squares regression, we show that orthogonal regression is necessary when complex relations among scaling exponents are to be investigated. Our results show that large cities in developed countries are typically more emission efficient than smaller ones due to their less than proportional emissions given their energy consumption. In contrast, larger cities in developing countries are typically less emission efficient owing to more than proportional GDP and emissions with respect to population and energy consumption, respectively. From a climate change mitigation point of view, our results indicate that large cities in developed regions should prioritize actions on improving energy efficiency while cities in developing regions should focus on adopting improved technologies to reduce emissions from energy conversion.