Review on low-carbon development in Chinese industrial parks driven by bioeconomy strategies

Given the importance of decarbonizing industrial parks to low-carbon transformation of industrial sectors, this study aims to unveil the dynamic evolution and progress of low-carbon development in such parks through descriptive, bibliometric, and manifest content analysis. The review goes in two parallel ways: the pros and cons of diverse carbon emission accounting methods and carbon mitigation measures targeting industrial parks, and the three main-stream national policy innovations during the past four years. State-of-the-art scientific research and policy practices have been reviewed to panoramically depict the low-carbon transformation of Chinese industrial parks and distinguish their future bioeconomy pathways. The key findings include: (1) Despite large-scale explorations of carbon accounting for parks, the consistent boundaries of their physical systems and emission inventories must be resolved. (2) Carbon reduction actions are mainly concentrated on unit-level including energy and industrial infrastructure, but the decarbonization of system-level such as multisectoral collaborative systems requires more exploration. (3) Government policies are important for low-carbon development in industrial parks concerning efficiency improvement, synergy of pollution reduction and carbon mitigation, circular economy, performance assessment, structural upgrading, and industrialization–urbanization integration. (4) The bioeconomy must be innovated from both perspectives and the effective combination of unit-level processes (highlighting the application of biobased energy, materials, and equipment) and system-level processes (emphasizing biomimetic industries, biorefinery solutions, and symbiotic ecosystems). This unit–system integrated model is oriented to further bioeconomy both in Chinese industrial parks and similar industrial clusters in other developing countries.