As national efforts to reduce CO2 emissions intensify, policy-makers need increasingly specific, subnational information about the sources of CO2 and the potential reductions and economic implications of different possible policies. This is particularly true in China, a large and economically diverse country that has rapidly industrialized and urbanized and that has pledged under the Paris Agreement that its emissions will peak by 2030. We present new, city-level estimates of CO2 emissions for 182 Chinese cities, decomposed into 17 different fossil fuels, 46 socioeconomic sectors, and 7 industrial processes. We find that more affluent cities have systematically lower emissions per unit of gross domestic product (GDP), supported by imports from less affluent, industrial cities located nearby. In turn, clusters of industrial cities are supported by nearby centers of coal or oil extraction. Whereas policies directly targeting manufacturing and electric power infrastructure would drastically undermine the GDP of industrial cities, consumption-based policies might allow emission reductions to be subsidized by those with greater ability to pay. In particular, sector-based analysis of each city suggests that technological improvements could be a practical and effective means of reducing emissions while maintaining growth and the current economic structure and energy system. We explore city-level emission reductions under three scenarios of technological progress to show that substantial reductions (up to 31%) are possible by updating a disproportionately small fraction of existing infrastructure.

Bartlett School of Construction and Project Management University College London London WC1E 7HB UK

College of Economics Jinan University Guangzhou 510632 China

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering University of California Irvine Irvine CA 92697 USA

Department of Cultural History and Theory and Department of Social Sciences Humboldt University of Berlin Unter den Linden 6 10117 Berlin Germany

Department of Earth System Science Tsinghua University Beijing 100080 China

Department of Earth System Science University of California Irvine Irvine CA 92697 USA

Department of Environmental Studies Masryk University Joštova 10 602 00 Brno Czech Republic

Department of Geographical Sciences University of Maryland College Park MD 20742 USA

Department of Politics and International Studies University of Cambridge Cambridge CB3 9DT UK

Institute of Finance and Economics Research School of Urban and Regional Science Shanghai University of Finance and Economics Shanghai 200433 China

Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing 100101 China

International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis Schlossplatz 1 A 2361 Laxenburg Austria

Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement CEA CNRS UVSQ UMR8212 Gif sur Yvette Paris France

Laboratory for Climate and Ocean Atmosphere Studies Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences School of Physics Peking University Beijing 100871 China

Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research 14473 Potsdam Germany

Resnick Sustainability Institute California Institute of Technology Pasadena CA 911125 USA

School of Environment Tsinghua University Beijing 100084 China

School of Materials Science and Engineering State Key Lab of Material Processing and Die and Mould Technology Huazhong University of Science and Technology Wuhan Hubei 430074 China

University of Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing 100049 China

University of Potsdam Stockholm Resilience Centre Stockholm Sweden

Water Security Research Centre Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research School of International Development University of East Anglia Norwich NR4 7TJ UK

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