Rapid Emission–Economy Decoupling alongside the Urbanization of Chinese Counties

As China makes progress in air pollution control, the growing need for targeted pollution mitigation poses a great challenge for fine-scale emission tracking. However, the lack of up-to-date high-resolution emission data precludes a timely, spatially detailed assessment of emission distributions and their evolution with economic development. Here we derive summertime nitrogen oxides emissions from 2018 to 2024 for a total of 2,842 counties at different levels of urbanization in mainland China, based on satellite measurements and a fast, physics-based emission inversion method. The results show widespread declines in 84.1 ± 7.3% of counties. Among the 1,779 counties with available gross domestic product data, 76.7 ± 7.1% achieve absolute emission-economy decoupling (i.e., reduced emissions despite economic growth), and an additional 9.4 ± 3.9% exhibit relative decoupling (i.e., economic growth outpacing emissions growth). Relative emission reductions and emission-economy decoupling tend to be stronger in more urbanized counties, with the share of total national emissions moving toward less-urbanized, previously less-focused counties, particularly in the west. These results suggest structural progress toward greener development in Chinese counties along with an emerging need to shift attention toward less-urbanized locations.