Combining life cycle assessment and dynamic qualitative comparative analysis to analyze the environmental impacts of urban development across different provinces in China

Examining the environmental pollution landscape is a vital link for urban development. Across production, distribution, and usage stages of 24 provinces in China between 2010 and 2019, this study conducts Life Cycle Assessment and Dynamic Qualitative Comparative Analysis to explore the effects of conditional combination on environmental impact assessment indicators including Photochemical Oxidation, Eutrophication, Global Warming Potential, Human Toxicity, and Acidification. The results reveal that: (1) Shandong contributes most significantly to environmental impact assessment indicators in the production and distribution stages, while Inner Mongolia dominates the usage stage. In contrast, Beijing, Hainan, and Shanghai show lower contributions, though Hainan exhibits a rising trend in the Global Warming Potential index across all stages; (2) The production stage consistently accounts for the largest environmental impact, with notable differences in contributions from Beijing, Ningxia, Inner Mongolia, and Shanghai across the three stages; (3) Environmental impact is not driven by individual factors alone; rather, it is the combination of factors that proves influential. Complex nonlinear relationships are revealed between energy consumption patterns and environmental impacts in the production stage. The combination of transport operating distance and traffic volume has an interaction during the distribution stage. The usage stage leads only to the environmental impact of Eutrophication, which is caused by the resident population and ecological water consumption excluding residential water use. These findings present a new strategy for optimizing energy structure and water resource utilization, and emphasize the synergies to reduce the environmental impacts, providing instrumental implications for policymakers and government managers in environmental management and urbanization development.