Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing are the top three Chinese cities in terms of green development, according to a report published on Tuesday by the Green Development Initiative for Asia and the Pacific of Beijing Normal University.
Out of 100 cities in the Asia-Pacific region, two Chinese cities made it into the top 20 list, with Hong Kong ranked No.4 and Shanghai ranked No.15, according to the Asia-Pacific Urban Green Development Report: Building Better Cities for 2030.
Tokyo ranked first on the list, trailed by Seoul and New York. Among the top 15 cities, six are in the U.S. Beijing ranked No.21.
The cities are evaluated by their levels of livability, prosperity and governance, among other criteria.
On September 3, China and the U.S. expanded joint efforts on climate change by adoption of the international climate-change agreement reached in Paris in December 2015.
These steps raised the urgency for green development in China, experts said.
The report found that economic growth does not preclude green development, as all of the top 15 cities have an annual per capita GDP of over $14,000.
A city's creativeness, such as the number of patents filed within the city, is also in proportion to the city's level of green development, the report indicated, adding that most of the top 30 cities have a strong services industry such as financing or information technology.
The report found that Chinese cities still rank behind their U.S. counterparts in terms of green development, and it called for more efforts to learn from examples offered by leading cities in the region.
Zhao Zheng, deputy director of the Green Development Initiative for Asia and the Pacific, said the green development of Chinese cities is still confined to individual cities.
Green development has not yet been expanded into urban clusters in China, while the five U.S. cities on the top 15 list of the 100 surveyed cities are in such clusters on the west and east coasts of the US, Zhao said.
"In the Yangtze River Delta, for example, there is a wide gap between the green development of Shanghai and that of Nanjing [capital of East China's Jiangsu Province], which ranked No.66. Green development is more the result of work by individual municipal governments," Zhao told the Global Times on Tuesday, calling for an overall design to governance.
