Abstract
Rapid growth in e-commerce has intensified last-mile logistics, increasing pressures on urban sustainability due to rising delivery-related greenhouse gas emissions. However, effective mitigation has been limited by the absence of nationwide, fine-grained measurements of last-mile emissions. Here, using 14 billion orders and location data from 1.9 million couriers, we estimate last-mile delivery emissions across 365 Chinese cities. We find that order growth does not translate proportionally into emissions: an 83.5% increase in orders from 2023 to 2024 resulted in only 31.3% additional emissions. While larger cities produce higher total emissions, smaller cities show per-order emissions up to four times greater, driven primarily by lower delivery efficiency shaped by urban density. Mitigation simulations suggest that emissions could be reduced by up to 84.2%. These findings advance understanding of how e-commerce interacts with urban systems and reveal actionable pathways toward more efficient and sustainable urban logistics.
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Data availability
The express data statistics are available from the official website of the State Post Bureau of the People’s Republic of China (https://www.spb.gov.cn/gjyzj/c100276/common_list.shtml). Sociodemographic information, including city-level GDP data, is available from Provincial/Municipal Statistical Yearbooks or Municipal Statistical Bulletins, such as the Hubei Provincial Statistical Yearbook (https://tjj.hubei.gov.cn/tjsj/sjkscx/tjnj/qstjnj/), accessible on the official websites of the provincial and municipal statistics bureaus. The detailed emission data are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Code availability
The code supporting this study is available via Github at https://github.com/rh20624/GreenhouseGas202412/tree/main.
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Acknowledgements
Shuai Wang is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant nos. 62272098 and U24B20152). T.H. is supported by the Financial Support for Outstanding Scientific and Technological Innovation Talents Training Fund in Shenzhen. Y.L. is supported by National Key Research Plan under grant no. 2024YFC2607404, the Jiangsu Provincial Key Research and Development Program under grants BE2022065-1 and BE2022065-3, as well as the Ningxia Domain-Specific Large Model Health Industry R&D no. 2024JBGS001.
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Z.H. contributed to the study conceptualization, methodology design, model implementation and draft writing, review, and editing. Z.L. contributed to the model implementation. S.Z. and W.L. contributed to the methodology design and draft writing. H.W. and Shenhao Wang contributed to draft reviewing and editing. Y.L., D.G., T.H. and G.W. contributed to the study conceptualization and draft reviewing and editing. Shuai Wang and D.Z. contributed to the study conceptualization, draft reviewing and editing, supervision and project administration.
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H.W. and T.H. are employees of JD and own shares in the company. The other authors declare no competing interests.
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Nature Cities thanks Paul Buijs, Meng Li, Kailai Wang and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
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Hong, Z., Li, Z., Zhong, S. et al. Decarbonizing emissions from last-mile deliveries in Chinese cities. Nat Cities (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-026-00423-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-026-00423-1
