Effect Of The Smart City Pilot Policy On Carbon Emission Reduction

As global warming continues to accelerate,addressing climate change has become the most talked about global governance issue today.Cities play an important role in the process of addressing climate change and achieving the carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals.Smart cities are the ideal solution to tackle "urban diseases" in the digital era,and their construction is also the way to achieve the dual carbon goal and combat climate change.So far,three batches of "smart city" pilots have been conducted in China,and the academic community has paid increasing attention to smart cities,but little literature has explored the impact of smart city pilot policies on urban carbon emissions and has not paid attention to the possible dual effect on carbon emissions in the construction of smart cities.Whether smart cities have carbon emission reduction effects remains to be explored.At the same time,the factors through which smart city pilot policies affect urban carbon emissions as an intermediate channel need to be further explored.Based on the panel data of 283 cities in China from 2009 to 2019,this paper uses a multi-period difference-in-differences method to investigate the impact of the "quasi-natural experiment" of smart city pilot policies on urban carbon emissions and carbon intensity,and applies various robustness tests to verify the credibility and scientific validity of the results.In addition,the influence mechanism of the carbon emission reduction effect of the "smart city" pilot policy and the heterogeneity of different city characteristics on the carbon emission reduction effect are explored.Finally,the spatial spillover effect of the carbon emission reduction effect of this policy was explored through the spatial Durbin model.The results found that: First,smart city construction can significantly reduce carbon emission intensity,but not carbon emissions,thus the carbon reduction effect and carbon rebound effect coexist.Second,the carbon emission reduction effect of smart city pilot policies is mainly realized through infrastructure wisdom and production and life wisdom,and the effect is more obvious in cities in South and Northwest China,cities with higher levels of economic development,stronger financial support,high administrative level cities and non resource-based cities;Third,the carbon reduction effect of smart city construction has a spatial spillover effect.The findings of this paper provide policy insights for high-quality construction of smart cities and accelerating low-carbon transformation: First,the content of the pilot construction of smart cities should be further optimized to give full play to the carbon emission reduction effect of the policy.Second,the construction direction of smart cities should be enriched to suppress the carbon rebound effect.Third,the pilot policy of smart cities should be promoted in an orderly manner and precise policies should be applied according to local conditions;Finally,the carbon emission reduction guarantee mechanism of smart cities with policy synergy,regional synergy and subject synergy should be established.