The low carbon development is an important way of sustainable development. It is China's established strategic goal to develop a low-carbon economy. In this background, based on the empirical data on China's provincial level from 2005 to 2015, this paper evaluates, ranks and analyzes the low carbon development performance for China's 30 provincial regions using the TOPSIS (technique for order preference similarity to ideal solution) model. It is indicated that low carbon development indicators of China's provincial regions are stable in general while some provinces show a downward trend. By clustering analysis, the 30 provincial regions can be divided into 4 groups, which are the best performed group, the upper-middle performed group, the middle-lower performed group and the worst performed group. The Analysis of Variance shows that there exist significant differences between the better performed groups and the worse performed groups. In order to examine whether there exists a spatial interdependence in terms of the provincial low carbon development, the statistical variable Moran's I is calculated to test the spatial reliance and it is found that the spatial interdependence is not significant among the provincial low carbon development indicators.

low carbon development  /  TOPSIS  /  clustering analysis  /  analysis of variance  /  spatial interdependence test