In February 2023, with the support of Energy Foundation China, the Guangdong Provincial Academy of Environmental Science released this report summarizing how land use affects carbon emissions in one of China’s top manufacturing provinces.

The report reveals the spatial characteristics of land use-related carbon emissions in Guangdong, through an analysis of energy consumption and construction land use data in 2020. It proposes to use the “carbon productivity of industrial land use” as a measure of the amount of carbon emissions per unit of economic activities in a standard-size piece of industrial land. It also builds an evaluation system for green and low carbon land use, using various cities in Guangdong as examples. The authors hope their research findings may lay a foundation for future studies on land use-related carbon emission intensities and spatial characteristics based on different spatial scales and land types.