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With their focus on human production and consumption activities, cities incur massive energy consumption and CO 2 emissions. An intercity connection is a typical complex system in which the interaction between cities is crucial for developing low‐carbon outputs within the urban agglomeration. This paper presents the construction of the CO 2 emission network of an urban agglomeration in the Yangtze River middle reaches megalopolis, based on the gravity model. Combined with social network analysis (SNA), a multilevel analysis framework is proposed to deal with the complexity, spatiality, and visualization of the CO 2 emission network with reference to the network features, structural equivalence, and the rich‐club phenomenon. The following results emerged: firstly, the spatial structure of the CO 2 emissions was characterized by low robustness and compactness, indicating disunity among the studied cities. Secondly, there was found to be a strong correlation between regionalism and intercity connections, with geographically close cities playing a similar role in the network. Thirdly, the “rich‐club” cities, including Wuhan, Changsha, Xiaogan, and Zhuzhou, dominated the connections, covering more than 87.1% of the network in the Yangtze River Middle Reaches Megalopolis.
Zuo et al. (Fri,) studied this question.