Urban and rural energy use and carbon dioxide emissions in Asia

The process of urbanization has been shown to be important for economic development, environmental impacts and human wellbeing, particularly in developing countries. In this paper we compare structure, data sources and scenario results of four integrated assessment models that are capable of analyzing different aspects of urbanization. The comparison focuses on residential sector energy use and related CO2 emissions based on a set of urbanization scenarios for China and India. Important insights from this model comparison include that (i) total fossil fuel and industrial CO2 emissions at the regional level are not very sensitive to alternative rates of urbanization and are largely dependent on the linkage between urbanization and economic growth via differentiated labor productivity in urban and rural areas, (ii) alternative urbanization pathways may yield different results for the share of solid fuels in residential energy use, thereby affecting the number of people relying on these fuels and the associated adverse health impacts, and (iii) alternative economic growth scenarios can only be assessed for their welfare implications if urban and rural household are distinguished, even though that distinction does not always strongly affect aggregate outcomes which is often due to two effects that compensate each other in total. It can be concluded that urbanization and heterogeneity of households and consumers are clearly relevant for distributional effects and associated health and social impacts.