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Abstract Cities do play significant roles in tackling global environmental changes. Decoupling economic growth from environmental pressures is critical for global sustainable development, however, few studies pay attention to the decoupling analysis at city level. This paper conducts a comparative study of the decoupling performance of economic output from CO 2 emissions between Beijing and Shanghai, the top two cities in China. In this paper, the decoupling trends and the decoupling effects are explored from a sectoral perspective, by combining the Tapio decoupling elasticity and the logarithmic mean Divisia index (LMDI) model. The results show that Beijing and Shanghai both experienced weak decoupling in construction, expansive negative decoupling in transport, expansive coupling in trade, and weak decoupling in others over the period 2000–2015. Moreover, agriculture appeared strong decoupling in Beijing, and recessive decoupling in Shanghai; industry showed strong decoupling in Beijing, and weak decoupling in Shanghai. The decoupling effects showed different magnitudes and patterns in industrial sectors between Beijing and Shanghai. Overall, per-capita GDP and population growth inhibited the decoupling, while energy intensity, industrial share, energy mix accelerated the decoupling process. Highlights • The decoupling of sectoral economic output from carbon emissions in Beijing and Shanghai are investigated. • Beijing's industry enjoyed better decoupling performance than Shanghai's industry. • Transport should be put more emphasis in further decoupling efforts. • Energy intensity is crucial effect accelerating the decoupling process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transportation sector is one of the major driving forces of carbon emissions. Identifying the factors that affect CO 2 emissions from the transportation sector is important to build a low-carbon city. Most existing research focuses on the total effect of factors on CO 2 emissions while the indirect influence is also the driving force of CO 2 emissions. Additionally, identifying the causal relationship between variables is helpful to study the mutual acting mechanism. Therefore, this paper uses the path analysis model to estimate the direct, indirect and total influences of driving factors on transportation CO 2 emissions in Beijing and investigate the causality relationships between variables. The results show that reducing energy intensity and transportation intensity are the key factors in controlling the increase of transportation-related CO 2 emissions. Population has the greatest positive impact on CO 2 emissions because an increasing population is leading to growth in energy consumption and the number of motor vehicles. However, population could indirectly affect the energy intensity and transportation intensity to reduce carbon emissions. Moreover, motor vehicles increase CO 2 emissions due to the growth in private car population and its low energy efficiency. And, the change in the economic growth pattern somewhat inhibits the growth rate of CO 2 emissions by reducing the energy intensity and transportation intensity indirectly. To further suppress the growth of transportation carbon emissions, the following steps should be taken: appropriately improve the quality of population, control the scale of motor vehicles, develop and promote clean energy, and reduce traffic energy intensity and transportation intensity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]