Acquiring and geo-visualizing aviation carbon footprint among urban agglomerations in China

This paper had two main purposes. One was to estimate annual total aviation CO₂ emissions from/among all key urban agglomerations (UAs) in China and its changes patterns from 2007 to 2014. The second one was to visualize the aviation carbon footprints among the UAs by using a chord diagram plot. This study also used Kaya identity to decompose the contribution of potential driving forces behind the aviation CO₂ emissions using Kaya identity. Especially, it decomposed factor CO₂/gross domestic product (GDP), which is wildly used in Kaya identity analysis, into factor CO₂/value-added (VA) and factor VA/GDP. Here, VA represents the tourism value added of the corresponding flights. The main results were: (1) The UAs developed a much bigger and stronger carbon network among themselves. (2) There was also an expanding of the flows to less densely populated or less developed UAs. However, the regional disparity increased significantly. (3) Compared with the driving factor of population, the GDP per capita impacted the emission amount more significantly. Our contribution had two folds. First, it advances current knowledge by fulfilling the research gap between transport emissions and UA relationship. Second, it provides a new approach to visualizing the aviation carbon footprints as well as the relationships among UAs.