The modern climate change science has made important contribution to the development outlook progress of mankind. The combination of China’s new thinking about the development pattern with the international development outlook has promoted the success of COP21 in Paris. The paper summarized the four highlights of the Paris Agreement and the five problems to be solved after Paris conference. China’s low-carbon development goals are of significant meanings for its sustainable development. The paper has analyzed the scientific essence of the goals. The 13th-Five-Year-Plan is the key period of China’s low-carbon transition. For this end the five important works have been suggested. The paper has emphasized the strong correlation between addressing climate change and improving air quality. The domestic and international aspects of addressing climate change are supported each other. The domestic low-carbon transition is the key and basis.

Climate mitigation can only be achieved through international cooperation, due to the global externality of greenhouse gas emissions, which asks policy centralization somehow and should take into account the wideness of participation, scope and ambition of mitigation actions. Several approaches were established or designed to address the international climate mitigation cooperation, including UNFCCC, Kyoto Protocol and its Doha Amendment, Cancun Agreements, etc. These approaches take trade-off among participation, scope and ambition in different ways, however, none of them successfully addressed the issue. The Paris Agreement established a mitigation cooperation approach called “pledge and review”, which could be satisfied with wide participation, full range of mitigation scope, and would partially address the matter of ambition by the transparency, compliance and global stock take mechanism as set. To achieve the objectives and the goals set up by the Convention and Paris Agreement, there is a need to enhance and functionalize finance, technology and capacity-building mechanisms to help developing countries enhance their capabilities for mitigation cooperation, while there is still a need for setting mid-long-term quantified global mitigation goal to enable and facilitate participants to raise the level of ambition.

UNFCCC Paris Conference (COP21) reached important outcome including the Paris Agreement, which clarifies a package of global long-term goals to address climate change. The inclusion of aiming for 1.5℃ temperature control indicated enhanced political willingness for climate risk control, and the Paris Agreement also primarily depicted the global emission trajectory. In the future, scientific assessment and political negotiation could further clarify quantitatively emission space, emission trajectory and reduction requirements at global and regional level, or even for major emitting countries as well. Such a trend could integrate detailed top-down elements into the new global climate regime, which was gradually developed mainly via a bottom-up approach featuring the INDC process. This trend would have huge implications for developing countries and particularly for major developing emitters, for their emission allowances and emission space, and might influence the characteristics of national determination of countries?climate contributions.

Studies on spatial-temporal differentiation of regional carbon imbalance based on urban functional zoning will be beneficial in understanding the mechanism of urban function pattern affecting urban compound ecosystem carbon cycle. Xiamen city, with its 6 administrative districts, was taken as a study case and statistical data and land-use data processed by satellite image were adopted. Carbon emissions and carbon sinks were accounted for each district in different historical periods by using simplified accounting models. The results showed aggravating imbalance trend in overall carbon budget of Xiamen city, in 2013 CO₂ emissions were 7.44 times more than CO₂ sequestration, compared to 1.91 times in 2003, and carbon imbalance condition distribution has spatial-temporal heterogeneity. Combined with the main regional functions of city development planning, we discuss the mechanism and process of social economic indicators and landscape, which are most influenced by the main functions, affecting the temporal and spatial change of regional carbon imbalance.We conclude that specific carbon abatement or carbon offsetting policies should be considered to address the regional main functions based on individual current carbon imbalance condition. This highlights the importance of urban planning in maintaining regional carbon balance. The aggravating climate change caused by urbanization will require reasonable urban functional zoning with the consideration of urban ecological services.

Public bicycle system was needed to be developed into voluntary carbon emission reduction project. In this paper, CCER methodology “Bus Rapid Transit Projects” was used to calculate carbon emission reductions of Beijing public bicycle system in 2012 and estimate revenue. The results show that the total carbon emission reductions of Beijing public bicycle in 2012 was 43.95 t CO₂ and public bicycle operators would get income 1538 RMB from selling it. Moreover, it was about 6874.5 t CO₂ in 2015, which would make income 240000 RMB. Therefore, with the continued development and expansion of public bicycle system, the economic benefit of operators was expected to achieve great improvement through carbon trading in Beijing and other heavy traffic cities.

Take Shanghai as a coastal mega city case in China, this article aimed to give first-hand information about how urban planners think about adaptation planning. Based on social survey and participatory assessment, representatives from relevant agencies were interviewed to know about their risk perception, attitude and suggestions on the significance, function and priority of urban adaptation planning. Finally, some policy recommendations were higlighted to give reference to municipal policy makers and push forward adaptation planning research in China.

The CO₂ emission affecting factors and performance were analyzed on the district/county level in Yangtze River Delta region in 2012, by the methods of partial least squares regression and residual models based on the dataset including direct and indirect emissions, population, GDP and income etc. The results showed that the emissions were clustered, top 40 emitters accounting for 86.59% of the total emissions in this region. Economic activity, population scale and population density have significant impacts on the emissions. The effect of population density is negative, which means that the compact morphology of districts/counties is favorable for low carbon emissions. There were 76 districts/counties and 56 districts/counties in the efficient and inefficient level respectively based on the performance evaluation. Generally, the performance was good when the population size of districts/counties are small (lower than 0.3 million) or very large (larger than 6.0 million), whereas it became complicated and fluctuated among districts/counties when the population size is in the middle level (0.3 million-6.0 million). The policies should focus on the morphology (population density) and population size of the districts/counties when directing the low carbon development in urbanization process of this region in the future.

From the perspective of land spatial development pattern based on major function oriented zoning, the urbanization area (both optimized development zones and key development zones) of case provinces is selected to analyze their social, economic and CO₂ emission status. Based on the above empirical study, the paper shows, from the perspective of low-carbon development, different urbanization areas have different roles in the urbanization process. The major role of optimized development zones is to stabilize and release population, and key development zones should be the major areas to allocate population moved from non-urbanization areas, in particular from key ecologically function zones. However, less developing drivers and/or extensive development has been observed widespreadly in key development zones, which will negatively influence the further concentration of economy and population. Therefore, looking for emerging growth and industry transition to low-carbon are crucial for key development zones to play an important role in the second urbanization process.

Research is done on risk regionalization of human health in Guangdong Province caused by high temperature & heat wave based on quantitative risk index. The hazard index of high temperature & heat wave, exposure index and vulnerability index (including sensitivity index and adaptability index) of hazard-affected body in Guangdong Province are constructed respectively, from the view of the construction of risk of human health caused by high temperature & heat wave, applying the internationally used risk concepts and analysis methods of natural disasters. The result indicates that the high hazard region is northeast, northwest and central west of Guangdong, while the low hazard region is mainly the littoral of Guangdong; the region of high human health sensitivity is north and west of Guangdong, while the Pearl Delta and the littoral of southeast of Guangdong relatively possess low sensitivity; the region of high human health adaptability is the Pearl Delta, while others possess low adaptability; high risk lies in east, northwest, central west of Guangdong and south of Leizhou Peninsula, and low risk lies in Pearl Delta and the littoral of its west. The risk index could better reflect the risk distribution of human health caused by high temperature & heat wave in Guangdong Province.

With high sensitivity and vulnerability to extreme weather, the agricultural field is chosen as the research object in this paper. By introducing the extreme weather factors and agricultural factors into the Cobb-Douglas production function, an economic climate model is developed and the effect of extreme weather events on agricultural production in Zhejiang Province is analyzed quantitatively. The results show that there is a long-term close equilibrium relationship between extreme weather events and agricultural production, and extreme weather has a significant negative impact on agricultural production. With each 1% increases of the high temperature days, the low temperature days, the heavy rain days resulted in the agricultural production decrease with 0.072%, 0.046%, 0.076% respectively. In addition, the short-term fluctuations of the high temperature days and the heavy rain days have significant negative impact on agricultural production, the extent of the influence by extreme weather on agricultural production manifests differences in different regions. Compared with the eastern coastal areas, northwest and southwest of Zhejiang Province are affected by extreme weather more seriously.

An environmental CGE model is developed to analyze the impacts of emission standard of air pollutants for thermal power plants GB 13223-2011 on China’s macro economy and air pollutants emission reductions. The simulation results show that the new standard has little effect on the macro economy with the GDP losing by 0.18%. From the industry output, due to the fall of factor prices, the industrial sector and the export-oriented industry’s cost reduce, which result in output expansion. In addition, the reduction effect of atmospheric pollutant emission is remarkable. Due to the increase of removal rate for exhaust gas and coal combustion emissions decrease significantly, SO₂ and NO_X emissions are decreased by 22.8% and 11.4%, with the absolute volume decreased by 5.60 Mt and 1.48 Mt, respectively.

Based on classical mass-communication theory and modes, we attempted to summarize existing ways of climate change knowledge products preparing, main communication route, and practice experiences, for providing further reference to study and practice on climate change knowledge communication in the future. It is concluded that, climate change knowledge communication process should follow the basic rules of information communication, and fully consider the complexity and interlace characteristics of climate change knowledge. In terms of knowledge gathering, we emphasized scientificity, systematicness, accuracy, and authority of the information. In terms of displaying mode, we emphasized readability, interestingness, simplification and popularity of the content. In terms of transmission, we specially emphasized using of emerging internet and social media platforms, to promote the roles of interpersonal relationship network, in addition to the traditional mass media. Under the new situation of national economic and social development, it is necessary to further strengthen the innovative research on the theory, mode and practice of climate change knowledge communication.