Climate change adaptation in China: Differences in electricity consumption between rural and urban residents

We use high-frequency electricity consumption data (17.58 million observations) at level of household to parameterize the relationship between household electricity consumption and temperature for southern China. We find that although urban households are more sensitive to extreme temperature than rural households, with climate warming, rural households would adopt climate change adaptive behavior (e.g. installing air-conditioning), and rural households' sensitivity to temperature would increase significantly. Considering the long-run response, we find that climate warming as predicted under the RCP8.5 scenario would lead to an increase of 23.42 % and 22.28 % in the summer peak electricity consumption of rural and urban households in 2061–2080. Compared with the results of short-run response, ignoring the long-run response would lead to the summer peak electricity consumption of rural and urban households being underestimated by 56.13 % and 20.11 %. Only for our research sample, the economic losses in rural and urban areas caused by climate warming are as high as 1.358 billion Chinese yuan and 0.617 billion Chinese yuan in 2061–2080 under the RCP 8.5 scenario. Climate change would bring serious losses to rural residents.