ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Spatial Heterogeneity of Driving Forces
in Response to Carbon Emissions from Land Use
at County-Level in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Region
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College of Geoscience and Surveying Engineering, China University of Mining and Technology (Beijing),
Beijing 100083, China
Submission date: 2022-07-18
Final revision date: 2022-09-02
Acceptance date: 2022-09-10
Online publication date: 2022-12-05
Publication date: 2022-12-21
Corresponding author
Linlin Cheng
College of Geoscience and Surveying Engineering, China University of Mining and Technology (Beijing), China
Pol. J. Environ. Stud. 2023;32(1):267-279
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ABSTRACT
Carbon emissions from land use (LUCE) is an increasingly serious problem in China, and the
direction of carbon reduction in urban agglomerations is still unclear. This study aimed to identify
the key factors that influence county-level LUCE and their response to LUCE in Beijing-Tianjin-
Hebei (BTH) region. Based on multi-source data, our study calculated county-level LUCE and its
spatiotemporal variations in BTH from 1992 to 2018. Random forest (RF) and geographically weighted
regression (GWR) models were applied to discuss influential factors’ impact and spatial response on
LUCE by quantifying relative importance and spatial heterogeneity. The results show that countylevel
LUCE in BTH increased by 1300.04×104t, with an average annual growth rate of 46.11% during
1992-2018, and exhibited prominent spatial autocorrelation, with higher-value counties mostly in the
core areas and lower-value counties in the suburbs within BTH. The RF estimates were better than the
multiple linear regression (MLR) estimates with an improvement in R2 from 0.56 to 0.98. Population,
urbanization, energy intensity, industry proportion, road network density and technical progress had
effective explanatory power for county-level LUCE. In addition, GWR estimation shows that the main
influencing factors demonstrated significant spatial heterogeneity, and the impacts of population,
urbanization, economic, energy structure and road factors in the central core counties were significantly
higher than in the northwestern and southern regions. Industrial structure and technology have the
greatest impact in the southern and northeast counties. This study explores different causes of LUCE in
different counties of urban agglomerations and the continuation of low-carbon control measures in BTH
is required.