Key driving forces on the development of low carbon city (LCC) in China

Abstract Developing low carbon city (LCC) has been widely appreciated as the key strategy for achieving emission mitigation goal. Despite the impact factors on cities’ carbon emission reduction have been extensively studied in recent years, little attention has been paid to investigating the key driving force (KDF) on the development of LCC. This study aims to explore the KDF affecting LCC within the context of China through identifying systematically representative forces (RFs) and examining the interactive relationships between RFs. Based on topic modeling of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), RFs for LCC are identified firstly from the policies issued by the pilot LCCs in China. Then KDFs for LCC are investigated through establishing the interactive relationships between RFs by adopting the Interpretive Structure Modeling (ISM). Results show that: (1) 16 RFs on LCC are identified from the pilot LCC policies in China; (2) emission trading system, carbon emission accounting system, and low carbon planning are identified as the KDFs on the development of LCC; (3) carbon sink is positioned at the topmost level and performs as the most frontier force on the development of LCC. Results of the KDFs identification can provide policy-makers with insight for designing LCC improvement path, and consequently promote emission mitigation in China.