%0 Journal Article
%T Evaluation of a Low-Carbon City: Method and Application
%A Meirong Su
%A Ronghua Li
%A Weiwei Lu
%A Chen Chen
%A Bin Chen
%A Zhifeng Yang
%J Entropy
%D 2013
%I MDPI AG
%R 10.3390/e15041171
%X Many cities around the World have established the development objective of becoming a low-carbon city. Evaluation of such a city is important for its progress. A new evaluation framework of urban low-carbon development level is proposed in this paper, which integrates synthetic evaluation based on a bottom-up idea and analytical diagnosis based on a top-down idea. Further, set pair analysis is combined for synthetic evaluation and analytical diagnosis by comparing urban low-carbon development levels of different cities, through which the comprehensive state of urban low-carbon development level can be obtained and limiting factors identified. Based on the proposed framework and set pair analysis, low-carbon development levels of 12 Chinese cities are compared. Some suggestions are provided, based on results of overall situations of urban low-carbon development level and concrete performances of various factors and specific indicators. We conclude that both synthetic evaluation and analytical diagnosis are important for evaluation of urban low-carbon development level. The proposed framework and method can be widely applied in the evaluation of different cities over a long-term period.
%K low-carbon city
%K evaluation framework
%K synthetic evaluation
%K analytical diagnosis
%K set pair analysis
%U http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/15/4/1171