ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Environmental Health and Exposome
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1628610
This article is part of the Research TopicEnvironment and Healthcare, a two-way traffic: Challenges, Impacts, and Sustainable SolutionsView all articles
Impact Mechanisms of New Urbanization on Residential Building Carbon Emissions: Empirical Evidence from Chinese Pilot Cities
Provisionally accepted
- 1School of Business Administration, Liaoning Technical University, Fuxin, China
- 215114275612, huhudao, China
- 315114275612, Huludao, China
- 4huludao liaoning, huludao, China
- 5huludao liaoninghuludao, Huludao, China
- 6university, Huludao, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
In the context of China's new urbanization strategy and its "dual-carbon" goals, understanding the impact of urban transformation on carbon emissions in the residential sector is crucial. This study explores the influence mechanism of new urbanization on carbon emissions from residential buildings using panel data from 58 pilot cities between 2012 and 2021. A comprehensive analytical framework incorporating fixed-effects, mediation, and threshold models is employed to examine the direct, mediating, and nonlinear effects of new urbanization. The empirical findings indicate that: (1) new urbanization has a significant positive impact on residential building carbon emissions; (2) environmental regulation and scientific and technological innovation (STI) serve as mediators, each exhibiting emission-reducing effects within this relationship; (3) both environmental regulation and STI demonstrate double-threshold effects, with the regulatory impact diminishing at higher intensities, while the mediating effect of STI follows a nonlinear U-shaped trend; and (4) the mediating roles of environmental regulation and STI are subject to substantial regional and urban-size heterogeneity, being more effective in eastern regions and megacities. These results offer new empirical insights into the carbon implications of urban development and provide policy guidance for differentiated, region-specific, and innovation-driven carbon reduction strategies in the residential sector.
Keywords: New urbanization, Residential carbon emissions, environmental regulation, Scientific and technological innovation, Mediating effect, threshold effect, heterogeneity
Received: 14 May 2025; Accepted: 07 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Tong, Wang and Zhang. 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: Zhuo Tong, School of Business Administration, Liaoning Technical University, Fuxin, China
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.