Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the service industry, traffic, and secondary industry as revealed by the remotely sensed nighttime light data

Abstract

Exploring carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from human activities is essential for urban energy conservation and resource management. Remotely sensed nighttime lights from the Suomi NPP-VIIRS provide spatial consistency in and a low-cost way of revealing CO₂ emissions. Although many researches have documented the feasibility of the Suomi NPP-VIIRS data for assessing CO₂ emissions, few have systematically revealed the ability of nighttime lights for evaluating CO₂ emissions from different industries, such as service industry CO₂ emissions (SC), traffic CO₂ emissions (TC), and secondary industry CO₂ emissions (IC). Here, China was selected as the experimental subject, and we comprehensively explored the relationships between the nighttime lights and SC, TC, and IC, and investigated the factors mediating these relationships. We found that without considering other factors, the nighttime lights only revealed up to 51.2% of TC, followed by 41.7% of IC and 22.7% of SC. When controlling for city characteristic variables, the models showed that there were positive correlations between the Suomi NPP-VIIRS data and SC, IC, and TC, and that nighttime lights have an Inverted-U relationship with SC. The Suomi NPP-VIIRS data are more suitable for revealing SC, TC, and IC in medium-sized and large-sized cities than in small-sized cities and megacities.