China's economic restructuring helps improve land-use resilience of carbon metabolism: Evidences from three Chinese megacities

Megacities are significant land users and major contributors to global carbon emissions. It is urgent to enhance land-use resilience of megacities through a low carbon strategy. This necessitates a comprehensive understanding of the interactions between decarbonization and land-use resilience from a systematic network perspective. Using ecological network analysis combined with scenario projection methods, this study examined the temporal trends and socioeconomic determinants of the network resilience of carbon metabolism in three Chinese megacities (i.e., Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen) from 2000 to 2030. Our findings suggest that inefficient land expansion directly increased network redundancy, leading to higher carbon emissions and deteriorated land-use resilience. Furthermore, network resilience significantly declined as net carbon emissions neared their peak. Economic restructuring, driven by changes in structure- and efficiency-oriented factors, revealed both co-benefits and trade-offs between decarbonization efforts and network resilience. These improvements were mainly achieved through coupled strategies, with Beijing demonstrating the highest network resilience value (0.3524) during the last stage, compared to Shanghai (0.2810) and Shenzhen (0.2138). Scenario analysis highlighted notable fluctuations in network resilience in response to interventions, underscoring the need for adaptive measures to balance network efficiency and redundancy. To achieve low carbon and resilient development, Beijing must focus on structural transformation, Shenzhen on reducing energy intensity, and Shanghai on improving energy use efficiency. Our study provides valuable insights into the intricate relationship between urban economic resilience and low-carbon development, offering key implications for sustainable urban planning and management.