A strategy that informs on countries’ potential losses due to lack of climate action may facilitate global climate governance. Here, we quantify a distribution of mitigation effort whereby each country is economically better off than under current climate pledges. This effort-sharing optimizing approach applied to a 1.5 °C and 2 °C global warming threshold suggests self-preservation emissions trajectories to inform NDCs enhancement and long-term strategies. Results show that following the current emissions reduction efforts, the whole world would experience a washout of benefit, amounting to almost 126.68–616.12 trillion dollars until 2100 compared to 1.5 °C or well below 2 °C commensurate action. If countries are even unable to implement their current NDCs, the whole world would lose more benefit, almost 149.78–791.98 trillion dollars until 2100. On the contrary, all countries will be able to have a significant positive cumulative net income before 2100 if they follow the self-preservation strategy.

App-based ride-hailing is a newly emergent mode of travel that is expected to influence passengers’ travel behavior significantly. In this study, we define app-based ride-hailing services to include hailing of taxis through smartphone apps and sharing of private vehicles (car sharing is not included). This paper is one of the first quantitative studies to examine how app-based ride hailing would impact passengers’ choice of travel mode and change car-purchasing behaviors. China is taken as the empirical context, and the data are from a large-scale app-based survey conducted via the largest app-based ride-hailing platform in the world. Drawing on these rich survey data, the investigation covers both the short-term travel mode choices and long-term car-purchasing behaviors of app-based ride-hailing users. The research findings are helpful in understanding changes in urban residents’ travel behaviors under in context of app-based ride hailing, and provide valuable in-depth insights for both governments and app-based ride-hailing service providers (i.e., enterprises) for the management and regulation of ride hailing.

Achievement of national climate targets and the corresponding costs would entirely depend on regional actions within the country. However, because of substantial inequalities and heterogeneities among regions, especially in developing economies, aggressive or uniform actions may exacerbate inequity and induce huge economic losses, which in turn challenges the national climate pledges. Hence, this study extends prior research by proposing economically optimal strategies that can achieve national climate targets and ensure the greatest local and national benefits as well as regional equality. Focusing on the biggest developing country China, we find this strategy can avoid up to 1.54% of cumulative GDP losses for approaching carbon neutrality, and more than 90% of regions would obtain economic gains compared either with existing independently launched targets or with the uniform strategy that all regions achieve peak carbon emissions before 2030. We also provide optimal carbon mitigation pathways to regional peak carbon, carbon intensity and energy consumption.