Towards urban-rural development and equity in Western China: Insights gained from residential buildings' carbon emissions and per capita income

Abstract

The development and equity of urban and rural are crucial for the well-being of residents. However, the specific patterns of urban-rural integration (URI) and their impacts on regional energy development and equity, particularly in Western China, remain unclear. This paper proposes a new framework that combines the decoupling approach with the Gini coefficient, aiming to analyze the relationship between residential building carbon emissions and per capita income under different URI patterns from 2016 to 2020. The findings indicate that: (1) The western region can be divided into comprehensive development (CD), comprehensive lagging (CL), rural revitalization leading (RRL) and new urbanization leading (NUL) cities. Among them, the proportion of CL cities is 21.3 % (the smallest among all patterns), primarily distributed in the provinces of Qinghai and Guangxi. (2) Overall, rural areas exhibit better decoupling performance than urban areas. However, urban decoupling has gradually improved over time, with cities experiencing strong or weak decoupling reaching 52.8 %. (3) For cities like CD cities, there are significant urban-rural inequalities in per capita income, but smaller differences in residential buildings' carbon emissions. It is worth noting that NUL cities perform well both in terms of carbon emissions and income equity. The overall assessment of this study can be used as an input to the formulation of carbon reduction targets and subsidy policies to help achieve a more equitable energy transition.