Issues on climate change have been recognized as serious challenges for regional sustainable development both at a global and local level. Given the background that most of the artificial carbon emissions are resulted from the energy consumption sector and the energy is also the key element resource for economic development, this paper investigated the relationship between CO₂ emission, fossil energy consumption, and economic growth in the period 1970–2008 of nine European countries, based on the approach of Granger Causality Test, followed by the risk analysis on impacts of CO₂ reduction to local economic growth classified by the indicator of causality degree. The results show that there are various feedback causal relationships between carbon emission, energy consumption and economic growth, with both unidirectional and dual-directional Granger causality. The impact of reducing CO₂ emission to economic growth varies between countries as well.

This paper examines the GHG emission of industrial process in Shenyang city, in the Liaoning province of China, using the 2006 IPCC greenhouse gas inventory guideline. Results show that the total GHG emissions of industrial process has increased, from 1.48 Mt in 2004 to 4.06 Mt in 2009, except for a little decrease in 2008. The cement industry, and iron and steel industries, are the main emission sources, accounting for more than 90% of the total carbon emissions. GHG emissions in 2020 are estimated based on scenario analysis. The research indicates that the cement industry, and iron and steel industries, will still be the largest emission sources, and the total carbon emissions under the business as usual (BAU) scenario will be doubled in 2020 compared with that of 2009. However, when countermeasures are taken, the GHG emission will reduce significantly. Using more clinker substitutes for blended cement, and increasing direct reduction iron process and recycled steel scraps are efficient measures in reducing GHG emission. Scenario 4, which has the highest ratio of 30/70 blended cement and the highest ratio of steel with recycled steel-EAF process, is the best one. In this scenario, the industrial process GHG emission in 2020 can almost stay the same as that of 2009. From the perspective of regions, cement industry and iron and steel industry accounted for the vast majority of GHG emission in all industries. Meanwhile, these two industries become the most potential industries for reduction of GHG emission. This study provides an insight for GHG emission of different industries at the scale of cities in China.

Decoupling human well-being and local economic growth from resources consumption and environmental degradation has been recognized as a common vision to meet global sustainability. This paper taking Shenyang city as studied case aims to measure the decoupling process by proposing a set of new emergy-based and efficiency-oriented indicators. Decoupling process was verified in period of 1995–2010, and five new indicators including economic efficiency, the environmental pressure, the emergy-based five-year yield efficiency, the investment cost for decoupling, and the job-opportunities cost for decoupling were developed and applied. The results indicate that decoupling in Shenyang shows an erratic appearance, the trajectory of economic growth, and environmental pressure show absolute decoupling, while that of economic growth and resources utilization shows frequentative bending; emergy-based economic efficiency has been improved and the environmental pressure decreased along with the economic growth but the relative job cost per unit remains almost at the same level. However, this isolated and methodology-oriented case study provided the open-mind understandings to policy-making, thus, a wider scale comparison between different cities should be carried out for more knowledge mining.

Synthetic measurement of regional sustainable development has been one of the key issues in the research field of sustainability. In this paper, Qingyang City located in the Loess Plateau ecologically fragile area of Northwest China is used for a case study, and the present study aims to investigate the degree of sustainable development by conducting temporal- and spatial-scale based analysis, with the assessment index system, assessment model and GIS approach well integrated. The results show that the development pattern of Qingyang generally fits the mode of unsustainable development, even in the presence of certain levels of spatial differences. The sustainable development state in ecologically fragile area of China’s Loess Plateau is non-optimistic, which is an uncoordinated status among subsystems of regional sustainable development. Although the level and tendency of regional sustainable development keeps increasing, such enhancement is abnormal. With the rapid deterioration of environmental and natural resources, their inhibitory effect on the economy and society would expand, eventually leading to the slow development rate or the recession of the entire system. The only solution is to change the traditional mode of economic development, to follow the guide of ecological economic conception so that the goal of achieving regional sustainable development strategies could be met ultimately. Meanwhile, the characteristics of different regions should be taken into account in order to achieve optimal spatial structure.