Low-carbon transition at community-level: A guiding evaluation framework and empirical investigation from Yangtze River Delta Region of China

Global warming and climate crisis triggered by greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have become the core challenge of humanity in the 21st century. With more than 71% of carbon emissions occurring in urban areas, cities are both major contributors to carbon emissions and key actors in climate governance. The achievement of low-carbon goals not only requires strategic planning at the national level, but also relies upon fine-tuned commitment at city level. Urban community, as the grassroot underpinning components of an urban society, its low-carbon transition plays significant roles in achieving the overall carbon reduction goals. This study therefore establishes a holistic evaluation framework for assessing low carbon performance at community-level, which incorporates both “hardware” dimensions (including building energy efficiency, equipment upgrading, and technology adoption) and “software” dimensions (including community governance, residential behaviours and policy implementation), and integrates both carbon source factors (originated from building energy use, transportation, waste management, etc.) and potential ecological sink-related capacities (community green spaces and other environment elements potentially contributing to carbon sink). The evaluation framework includes a set of indicator checklist and indicator benchmarking setting approach, and a four step-based cyclic iterative evaluation process of community low-carbon transition. The evaluation framework has been empirically applied to investigate the performance of low-carbon transition via a selected case urban community at Yangtze River Delta Region of China. This research provides referrable toolkit to investigate the status quo of low-carbon transition performance in urban communities, which helps to diagnose the strength and weakness of the existing practices and to formulate evidence-based low-carbon transition strategies at community-level.