The year 2021 marks the entry of China’s development into the Second Centenary Goal from the First Centenary Goal, and the vision is to build a great modern socialist country by 2050 through a two-step plan with each step taking 15 years. By integrating the previous research results and looking into the green development of Chinese cities, I want to say that it will take three decades to decouple economic and social development from resource and environmental consumption. They are relative decoupling from 2021 to 2030, platform establishment from 2030 to 2040, and absolute decoupling from 2040 to 2050.

The focus of the first decade is the green transformation of industrial structures. According to the Kaya identity, with high GDP growth, the primary goal of green development is to achieve a peak material intensity per unit GDP through the dematerialization of the industrial structure and product structure. Further, if the intensity can be reduced to the average level of developed countries, the economic and social development of Chinese cities can be decoupled from resource and environmental consumption at a high standard.

The focus of the second decade is the green transformation of consumption patterns. By transforming the Kaya identity, we can see that as the population growth is leveled off, controlling the environmental impact of per capita consumption will become the main driver of green development. If China’s per capita GDP is doubled to more than USD 20,000 by 2035 and the per capita environmental impact does not exceed the world average, Chinese cities can realize absolute decoupling in the sense of total resources and environment in the third decade.

As I mentioned above, to decouple China’s urban development from resources and environment, what matters is to solve the four structural problems of economic and social development, namely, the energy structure based on coal consumption, the industrial structure based on heavy and chemical industries, the construction land structure based on land sprawl, and the transportation structure based on highway transportation. It can be said that the green development of Chinese cities is marked by the decoupling in four aspects of the four structural problems.

Seeing the four decoupling aspects of Chinese cities from the perspective of the consumption pattern, the fundamental issue is the four peaks of per capita resource and environmental consumption. Specifically, per capita carbon emissions should peak to decouple urban energy consumption from carbon dioxide; per capita household garbage generation should peak to decouple urban production and consumption from solid wastes; per capita construction land should peak to decouple urban development from construction land consumption; per capita car ownership should peak to decouple urban transportation from cars.

In terms of low-carbon cities, China has proposed carbon dioxide emission peaking by 2030, which means that when the urbanization rate reaches 70% and the per capita GDP exceeds USD 20,000, the per capita carbon dioxide emissions in cities shall not exceed 8 tons, which marks an advancement owing to the late-mover advantage compared with developed countries that realized modernization with 10 tons of per capita carbon dioxide emissions in their history. In the future, the development of Chinese cities should focus on how to shift from reducing production emissions from industries and electricity to controlling consumption emissions from transportation and buildings.

In terms of car-free cities, compared with the traditional modernization of developed countries characterized by 500 cars per 1,000 people, green transportation in Chinese cities in the future will be realized on a scale definitely smaller than that. By developing subways, ground and slow traffic within cities and rail transportation networks such as trunk lines, intercity and metropolitan area railways between cities, Chinese cities may modernize transportation within the ownership range of 300 cars per 1,000 people.

In terms of zero-waste cities, China’s management of municipal solid waste means realizing the peaking of per capita household garbage generation. In recent years, waste sorting has been advanced in society at large and waste incineration treatment has been strengthened to largely reduce the landfill of raw refuse, and China is working to maximize waste recycling. On this basis, a reduction in per capita household garbage generation or even controlling it to be below 1 kg per day can be expected.

In terms of compact cities, the key to the green development of Chinese cities is the per capita construction land not exceeding 100 square meters. In recent years, the new overall urban plans of many cities have set the development goal of zero or even negative growth in planned construction land, with a focus on controlling overpopulation in central and main urban areas and increasing population agglomeration in peripheral areas of metropolises. It is anticipated that the per capita urban construction land can also peak by 2035 when urbanization is basically achieved.