With accelerating global warming, reducing carbon emissions has emerged as a core task of global climate governance. In this process, digital infrastructure acts as a crucial catalyst for achieving sustainability goals. Drawing on a panel dataset covering 287 Chinese prefecture-level cities between 2010 and 2023, this paper examines how Broadband China policy influences carbon dioxide (CO2) emission intensity via a difference-in-differences approach. The outcomes show that Broadband China policy significantly reduces CO2 emission intensity, with pilot cities exhibiting a 5.01% decrease relative to non-pilot cities. This effect operates primarily through promoting green technological innovation and reducing energy consumption intensity. The reduction is more pronounced in large-scale and high developed regions, whereas the effect remains limited in small-scale and less developed regions. This study contributes to the literature by using carbon emission intensity, a structural indicator that better reflects the efficiency of low-carbon transition, to examine the digital economy and environmental governance. It further provides empirical support for other developing countries seeking to advance emission reduction through digitalization.
Against the background of the global green transition, digitalization has become an important driver of energy-efficiency improvement and carbon mitigation, making its overall environmental effects worthy of further investigation. This study constructs a pollution and carbon mitigation pressure (PCMP) index covering em...
In recent years, China’s Central No. 1 Document has repeatedly highlighted the need to advance agricultural digitalization and green transformation, with the aim of improving production efficiency while reducing carbon emissions. For the livestock sector, emission reduction is an essential component of achieving the ag...
The rapid expansion of the digital economy coincides with escalating environmental challenges, making Green Data Centers (GDC) an important form of digital infrastructure with potential implications for environmental governance. However, existing studies mainly evaluate data centers from the perspectives of energy effi...
Jing-Bao Cao, Sheng-Hao Bi· Global NEST Journal· 0 citations
Coordinating air pollution control with carbon mitigation is a central challenge for urban sustainability. However, there is currently a lack of sufficient research on whether digital infrastructure can complement environmental regulations to enhance the synergy of pollution and carbon emission reduction (SPCER). Using...
In the context of global digital transformation and the “dual carbon” goals, digital infrastructure and clean energy serve as pivotal drivers of regional economic development. However, whether their synergistic effect can promote high-quality regional economic growth remains unclear, and potential regional disparities...
The rapid expansion of the digital economy is reshaping the logistics industry. Its environmental effects are critical for the sector’s green transition. Using panel data from 30 Chinese provinces from 2011 to 2022, this study constructs a digital economy composite index via the entropy method. It then applies a two-wa...
