Sustainable urban infrastructure in China

Abstract

Through increasing urbanization, a large share of world's population is already now living in urban areas such as cities. Urban infrastructures will be of utmost importance to support the everyday life of the urban population. Their adequacy related to delivering everyday services needed by the citizens may sometimes be stressed to their limits, which may lead to issues with power grid reliability and energy supply, environmental damage, or jeopardizing human health. A common concern to all urban regions presently is the greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) from various energy uses. Often the energy needed is still produced with fossil fuels, but the Paris Climate Agreement from December 2015 calls for rapid cuts in emissions. For example, the European Union has committed to reach a net-zero of all GHG by the middle of this century. The above-described challenges are even more serious in the densely populated regions of the emerging economies such as China and India with huge populations and fast pace in urbanization. How these large countries will deal with their urban infrastructures aiming at better sustainability will have worldwide impacts, in particular for climate change mitigation. Due to the urgency of sustainability and climate protection, this Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews' (WIREs) collection of papers is focusing on the urban infrastructure sustainability in China, which is perhaps the most important country in the world from the climate and environmental perspective taken its size. The collection aims at providing state-of-the-art knowledge from the latest stand of science in relevant topics and helping to figure out possible better pathways into the future. WIREs is a series of interdisciplinary review journals that also serve as encyclopedic resources across a range of topics. We have chosen eight contributions into this collection covering three of the WIREs (Energy and Environment, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, and Water). The papers have a strong focus on the environment and climate, but view it from different perspectives, to provide a more versatile view on the urban infrastructure sustainability issues in China. In the next, we provide short summaries of the key observations from the eight articles in the collection to highlight their relevance: Zhu et al. (2020) reviewed the concept of smart city and resilient city and their differences and connections. Smart cities often relate to intensive use of information and communication technologies, but also to sustainable development. Whereas the resilient city relates mainly to its ability to absorb, adapt, and transform external pressures and ensure urban safety in the event of any crisis, hazards, or disasters. Both aspects are important for city development, but it seems that based on the research literature the smart cities develop faster than the resilient city concept. In spite of their differences, the authors conclude that both are necessary for the urban development and should be paid equal attention before decision-making. Smart energy systems assisted by data and information technology are regarded as promising solutions for energy system integration and have been put into regional practices as part of a low-carbon and sustainable energy transition. Zhao et al. (2021) reviewed concepts and regional practices of smart energy systems. They found that current practices were limited to small areas and that understanding the concept of smart energy system is still confusing, in particular in China. The authors therefore proposed development of multiregional smart energy systems, which provides a coordinated effort of subsmart energy systems, for example, of industrial parks, transportation networks, towns, and farms. The authors also observed that in China smart energy often includes also nuclear and fossil energy and emphasizes energy hubs. China has the highest GHG in the world with energy production dominated by coal leading to high emissions. Therefore, energy is definitely one of the key infrastructures to be addressed to cut emissions. China has indeed announced in 2020 to strive toward carbon neutrality by 2060, which will necessitate huge investments in energy infrastructures and clean energy. Turning more to solar photovoltaics (PV) and wind power in the power production will, however, require much more system flexibility. Gradually, renewable electricity sources will overtake the role fossil fuel sources. Zhang, Dai, et al. (2021) show in their review the importance of source-network-demand-storage coordinated DOI: 10.1002/wene.411