The Impact of Urban Construction Land Use Change on Carbon Emissions: Evidence from the China Land Market in 2000-2019

Urban construction land has an increasing impact on ecological carbon storage capacity and carbon emissions. Based on the theoretical analysis framework and the panel data of 278 prefecture-level cities in China from 2000 to 2019, this paper analyzes the impact of changes in urban construction land on carbon dioxide emissions. Our results suggest that the increase in urban construction land significantly promotes carbon dioxide emissions, and this conclusion still holds after selecting geographic and historical data as instrumental variables and conducting a series of robustness tests. Importantly, the newly added construction land and industrial land are important sources of increased carbon dioxide emissions, and there exist heterogenous impacts of the urban construction land on carbon emissions across different geographical distributions and different urban sizes. In addition, the results of the quantile regression show that, as the quantile level increases, the impact of changes in urban construction land on urban carbon emissions shows an inverted U-shaped trend that first increases and then decreases. Thus, our results provide evidence for promoting the coordinated development of land transaction marketization and low-carbon urban construction.