The allometric relationship between carbon emission and economic development in Yangtze River Delta: fusion of multi-source remote sensing nighttime light data

Exploring the allometric relationship between carbon emission and economic development can provide guidance for policy-makers who hope to accelerate carbon emission reduction and achieve high-quality development. First, based on the established DMSP/OLS and NPP/VIIRS nighttime light datasets, this study simulated the carbon emissions of the Yangtze River Delta from 2000 to 2020. Second, our research analyzed the spatiotemporal evolution characteristics of carbon emissions. Third, adopting allometric growth model, we explored the allometric relationship between economic development and carbon emissions in Yangtze River Delta. The main conclusions are as follows. First, four prediction models, namely, linear fitting, support vector machine, random forest, and CNN-BiLSTM deep learning, were compared to simulate the accuracy of carbon emissions. Consequently, the CNN-BiLSTM deep learning estimation model presented the best accuracy. Second, both the carbon emissions in YRD as a whole showed an increasing trend, with the largest growth rate appearing in Shanghai and the smallest growth rate occurring in Lishui. Moreover, the high-carbon emission areas were mainly distributed in the core city cluster, which are enclosed by Shanghai, Nanjing, and Hangzhou. Finally, the allometric relationship between economic development and carbon emissions was dominated by one-level negative during the sample period, and the relative growth rate of carbon emissions is lower than that of the economic development, which made the YRD at a basic coordinate stage of weak expansion of economy.