Aviation is a fast-growing source of greenhouse gases, and this map treats its emissions as a property of the air-transport network rather than of individual flights. It draws the intercity carbon-emission network of Yangtze River Delta (YRD) related passenger flights across China from 2019 to 2023, built from flight-level data. Each circle is a city and each line a route, and you can read the network through three lenses: total city emissions, a city’s hub role (how many routes it carries), and the network community it belongs to. Click any city to trace its own routes. The picture is one of concentration and persistence: emissions pile up in a few hubs, are carried by a handful of trunk routes, and snap back to their pre-pandemic structure after the 2022 COVID-19 disruption. The reading is that decarbonising aviation is not only a technological problem but a network one, about hub dominance, trunk connectivity, and the availability of alternative modes.
This map accompanies the paper Wang, Shi, Liu and Bao (2026), “Network analysis of aviation carbon emissions: spatiotemporal patterns and policy implications in the Yangtze River Delta”, Journal of Transport Geography; click the title to read the article. Emissions are estimated from flight and aircraft data, so the figures are modelled quantities rather than metered ones. The network covers the 22 YRD airport cities and their direct passenger-flight connections across China.