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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Earth Sci.

Sec. Geoscience and Society

Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feart.2025.1630832

The Coordination Effects of Low-Carbon City Pilot and Smart City Pilot on urban land green use efficiency: Evidence from Quasi-Natural Experiment in China

Provisionally accepted
Boya  LiBoya Li1Shuai  LiuShuai Liu2*Song  YuyuSong Yuyu1Zehui  CuiZehui Cui1
  • 1Beijing Wuzi University, Beijing, China
  • 2Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), Beijing, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Low-carbon city pilot and smart city pilot are two main measures which could improve urban land green use efficiency (ULGUE). We take two pilot policies as quasi-natural experiment. Using the difference-in-differences (DID) method, we designate "dual policy" cities as the treatment group to examine the combined effect of the policies on ULGUE. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to integrate these two policies into a unified analytical framework. This framework allows us to investigate both their coordination effects and the magnitude of differences between dual and single policies. We find that (1) Both the low-carbon pilot or smart city pilot can improve the ULGUE. (2) Dual-pilot cities show a stronger enhancement of ULGUE than the single policy. (3) Policy sequence demonstrates varying effect magnitudes, suggesting that ecological regulation provides a solid foundation for subsequent technological upgrading.

Keywords: Low-carbon city, Smart city pilot, urban land green use efficiency, Dual-pilot, DID

Received: 18 May 2025; Accepted: 25 Aug 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Li, Liu, Yuyu and Cui. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Shuai Liu, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), Beijing, China

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