Assessing the impact of regional coordinated development on a low-carbon future: Evidence from the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Coordinated Development Strategy

The Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Coordinated Development Strategy (BTHCDS) is an important way for China to explore the construction of an ecological civilization. Whether it can effectively reduce carbon emission (CE) not only affects the quality of the strategy's implementation but also has important implications for optimizing the low-carbon development model of the urban agglomeration and advancing the “dual carbon” process of China. Based on the panel data between of 30 provinces between 2004 and 2019, this study employed the synthetic control method (SCM) to construct a counterfactual path and assess the impact of BTHCDS on CE reduction at both the whole regional and provincial levels. The results show that the BTHCDS has a positive leading role in shaping the region's low-carbon future and can drive the overall CE reduction in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region at an annual rate of 10.43%. Despite short-term fluctuations in implementation, the CE reduction effect of BTHCDS has shown a steady trend of expanding overall. The CE reduction effects of BTHCDS exhibit heterogeneity across individual provinces, but there is no “pollution haven.” This study enriches research on the effect of regional coordinated integration development on CE reduction and provides an important policy reference for low-carbon development in other urban agglomerations.