The effect of policy planning, population and age structure on carbon emission under different city scale

Engineering Faculty, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia

^* Corresponding author’s e-mail: z5241542@ad.unsw.edu.au

Abstract

In recent years, air pollution has become more and more serious in the world. The transportation system in cities made a large contribution to carbon emission. Therefore, the problem of urban traffic pollution needed to be solved urgently. The city scale, population, the age structure of population and policy planning would influence the energy consumption and carbon emission of transportation systems. This article compared three different transportation systems: private motor vehicles, buses and subway in three cities. Beijing, Nanjing and Shijiazhuang were selected as the main cities which represented the different city scale. By reading the article about carbon emission from the transportation system and analyzing the research methods used before, this article analyzed the carbon emission from transportation in Beijing, Nanjing and Shijiazhuang. The article mainly included the following parts. First of all, ‘engineering technical model’ was used in this article. Using the ‘engineering technical model’ based on the data, which includes amounts of transportation tools, total miles, energy consumption and carbon emission factors, the carbon emission would be taken. Besides that, this article also predicted the carbon emission in 2035 based on ’The Fourteenth Five-Year Plan for the National Economic and Social Development of the People Republic of China and the Outline of the Long-range Goals to 2035’ to detect the effect of policy on carbon emission. At last, the cities with advanced transportation systems would have less carbon emission, but the super cities like Beijing still had the largest carbon emission. The age structure of the population also influenced carbon emission. Government policy was also the main influence factor for carbon emission. Under the government policy, the carbon emission of the transportation system decreased sharply.