Climate change has emerged as one of the most important environmental issues worldwide. As the world’s biggest developing country, China is participating in combating climate change by promoting a low carbon economy within the context of global warming. This paper summarizes the pathways of China’s low carbon economy including the aspects of energy, industry, low carbon cities, circular economy and low carbon technology, afforestation and carbon sink, the carbon emission trading market and carbon emission reduction targets. There are many achievements in the implementation of low carbon policies. For example, carbon emission intensity has been reduced drastically along with the optimizing of energy and industry structure and a nationwide carbon trading market for electricity industry has been established. However, some problems remain, such as the weakness of public participation, the ineffectiveness of unified policies for certain regions and the absence of long-term planning for low carbon cities development. Therefore, we propose some policy recommendations for the future low carbon economy development in China. Firstly, comprehensive and long-term planning should be involved in all the low carbon economy pathways. Secondly, to coordinate the relationship between central and local governments and narrow the gap between poor and rich regions, different strategies of carbon emission performance assessment should be applied for different regions. Thirdly, enterprises should cooperate with scientific research institutions to explored low carbon technologies. Finally, relevant institutions should be regulated to realize comprehensive low carbon transition through reasonable and feasible low carbon pathways in China. These policy recommendations will provide new perspectives for China’s future low carbon economy development and guide practices for combating climate change.

This paper optimises projected land-use structure in 2020 with the goal of increasing terrestrial ecosystem carbon storage and simulates its spatial distribution using the CLUE-S model. We found the following: The total carbon densities of different land use types were woodland > water area > cultivated land > built-up land > grassland > shallows. Under the optimised land-use structure projected for 2020, coastal Jiangsu showed the potential to increase carbon storage, and our method was effective even when only considering vegetation carbon storage. The total area will increase by reclamation and the original shallows will be exploited, which will greatly increase carbon storage. For built-up land, rural land consolidation caused the second-largest carbon storage increase, which might contribute the most as the rural population will continue to decrease in the future, while the decrease of cultivated land will contribute the most to carbon loss. The area near the coastline has the greatest possibility for land-use change and is where land management should be especially strengthened.