Spatiotemporal Variability of Carbon Flux from Different Land Use and Land Cover Changes: A Case Study in Hubei Province, China

Abstract

Carbon sources and sinks as a result of land use and land cover changes (LUCC) are significant for global climate change. This paper aims to identify and analyze the temporal and spatial changes of land use-based carbon emission in the Hubei Province in China. We use a carbon emission coefficient to calculate carbon emissions in different land use patterns in Hubei Province from 1998 to 2009. The results indicate that regional land use is facing tremendous pressure from rapid carbon emission growth. Source:sink ratios and average carbon emission intensity values of urban land are increasing, while slow-growing carbon sinks fail to offset the rapidly expanding carbon sources. Overall, urban land carbon emissions have a strong correlation with the total carbon emissions, and will continue to increase in the future mainly due to the surge of industrialization and urbanization. Furthermore, carbon emission in regions with more developed industrial structures is much higher than in regions with less advanced industrial structures. Lastly, OPEN ACCESSEnergies 2014, 7 2299 carbon emission per unit of GDP has declined since 2004, indicating that a series of reform measures i.e., economic growth mode transformation and land-use structure optimization, has initiated the process of carbon emission reduction.

Allocating and mapping carbon footprint at the township scale by correlating industry sectors to land uses

“…The intensity of energy consumption related to human activity is growing, and the carbon‐capture capacity of agricultural land is decreasing due to the reduction of forests and agricultural land, which results in an increasing energy‐consuming carbon footprint. Conversely, transportation, residential, and industrial land are rather highly and positively related to their carbon footprint, with Pearson's coefficients close to 1, which has been partly verified by previous studies (compare the “high correlation coefficient of 0.986 between total carbon emissions and urban land area” in Gao and others , 2306). Provided that, if transportation land increased 1.00 percent, the carbon footprint of transportation and warehousing would accordingly increase 0.80 percent.…”

“…Meanwhile, there was an increasing local difference in total carbon footprints, excluding the per capita carbon footprint, which was closely related to the regional distribution of economic and industrial outputs. Specifically, owing to shifting industrialization from central Wuhan, those towns or subdistricts belonging to or close to the center had the highest carbon footprints, which led to an ever‐increasing gap with such peripheral areas as towns in the Dabie and Mufu mountains (Gao and others ). Different from this, the per capita carbon footprint of townships in large cities was still relatively low, and the disparities were smaller than the total carbon footprint as well, which has been verified by others (Minx and others ).…”

“…Currently, the major CO 2 ‐emitting source is energy sectors (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ; Huisingha and others ), of which 90.4 percent (around 5.404 billion tons) are in China (National Development and Reform Commission of China ). So far, however, there are few detailed data sources on energy consumption at provincial scales (Zhao and others ; Chuai and others ; Gao and others ).…”

“…When the agricultural land use area descends by 1.00 percent, accordingly, agricultural carbon footprints (including agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting sectors) rise by about 5.68 percent. The reason for this may be soaring energy consumption as a result of urbanization and industrialization (Al‐mulali and others ; Dong and others ; Gao and others ). With declines in agricultural land area, the measured carbon tends to be transferred into newly built or suburban industrial regions.…”

“…Comparing with the former's abundance, fewer studies have addressed the top‐down spatial allocation (from larger scales to smaller scales) in geographical research from the down‐scaled prospective. These studies by environmental economists are well founded, but focus on methodological improvements rather than spatial analysis (Chin and Zhang 2013; Ahn ; Gao and others ; Pan and others ; Feng and others ; Miao and others ). In contrast, more geographers are concentrating on the spatial patterns of carbon footprints rather than their regional allocations, notably at larger scales, such as regional and national levels (Bai and others ; Chuai and others ; Huang and others ; Wang and others ).…”