Influence of multilevel governance on land use change in China's rapidly urbanizing metropolitan from low-carbon perspective

Low-carbon oriented land use change is crucial to tackling climate change issues in rapidly urbanizing metropolitans. Previous studies lacked to consider how the cross-level interaction within multilevel governance of metropolitan areas affect the land use change. In order to simulate multilevel governance interaction, this study proposes a land use simulation model, facilitating a comparative analysis of simulated results under different scenarios. Taking Hangzhou as the empirical study area, the results show that the predicted scale of construction land with high carbon emissions is smallest in interactive governance scenario. Its overall low-carbon performance of land use is the best among all scenarios, with a Polycentric Degree of 0.7856 (N = 4) and 0.9142 (N = 6), and Cohesion Degree and Land-Use Degree Index are 101.8320 and 101.7944 respectively. This study revealed that the interactive governance effectively curbs the growth of land with high-carbon emissions, promoting the spatial carbon efficiency and the low-carbon oriented spatial layout. Multi-level governance provides a framework for effective implantation of low-carbon oriented land use change objective and plays an important role in promoting its low-carbon performance. This study innovatively incorporates governance parameters into the land use prediction model, providing guidance for optimizing land use governance in metropolitan areas.