Carbon footprints of cities and other human settlements in the UK
Jan C. Minx,Giovanni Baiocchi,Giovanni Baiocchi,Thomas Wiedmann,Thomas Wiedmann,John Barrett,Felix Creutzig,Kuishuang Feng,Michael Förster,Peter-Paul Pichler,Helga Weisz,Klaus Hubacek +11 more
TLDR
In this paper, the authors use a hybrid method for estimating the carbon footprint of cities and other human settlements in the UK explicitly linking global supply chains to local consumption activities and associated lifestyles.Abstract:
A growing body of literature discusses the CO2 emissions of cities. Still, little is known about emission patterns across density gradients from remote rural places to highly urbanized areas, the drivers behind those emission patterns and the global emissions triggered by consumption in human settlements—referred to here as the carbon footprint. In this letter we use a hybrid method for estimating the carbon footprints of cities and other human settlements in the UK explicitly linking global supply chains to local consumption activities and associated lifestyles. This analysis comprises all areas in the UK, whether rural or urban. We compare our consumption-based results with extended territorial CO2 emission estimates and analyse the driving forces that determine the carbon footprint of human settlements in the UK. Our results show that 90% of the human settlements in the UK are net importers of CO2 emissions. Consumption-based CO2 emissions are much more homogeneous than extended territorial emissions. Both the highest and lowest carbon footprints can be found in urban areas, but the carbon footprint is consistently higher relative to extended territorial CO2 emissions in urban as opposed to rural settlement types. The impact of high or low density living remains limited; instead, carbon footprints can be comparatively high or low across density gradients depending on the location-specific socio-demographic, infrastructural and geographic characteristics of the area under consideration. We show that the carbon footprint of cities and other human settlements in the UK is mainly determined by socio-economic rather than geographic and infrastructural drivers at the spatial aggregation of our analysis. It increases with growing income, education and car ownership as well as decreasing household size. Income is not more important than most other socio-economic determinants of the carbon footprint. Possibly, the relationship between lifestyles and infrastructure only impacts carbon footprints significantly at higher spatial granularity.read more
Citations
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Humanity’s unsustainable environmental footprint
TL;DR: This work reviews current footprints and relates those to maximum sustainable levels, highlighting the need for future work on combining footprints, assessing trade-offs between them, improving computational techniques, estimating maximum sustainable footprint levels, and benchmarking efficiency of resource use.
Journal ArticleDOI
Consumption-based emission accounting for Chinese cities
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors employ an input-output model to calculate consumption-based CO2 emissions for thirteen Chinese cities and find substantial differences between production-and consumptionbased accounting in terms of both overall and per capita carbon emissions.
Human Settlements, Infrastructure and Spatial Planning
Karen C. Seto,Shobhakar Dhakal,Anthony G. Bigio,Hilda Blanco,Gian Carlo Delgado,David Dewar,Luxin Huang,Atsushi Inaba,Arun Kansal,Shuaib Lwasa,James E. McMahon,Daniel Mueller,Jin Murakami,Harini Nagendra,Anu Ramaswami +14 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors allocated 52 template pages, currently it counts 55 pages (excluding this page 5 and the bibliography), so it is 3 pages over target, reviewers are kindly asked to indicate where the 6 chapter could be shortened.
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Global typology of urban energy use and potentials for an urbanization mitigation wedge
TL;DR: The analysis is based on data from 274 cities and three global datasets and provides a typology of urban attributes of energy use, showing that, for affluent and mature cities, higher gasoline prices combined with compact urban form can result in savings in both residential and transport energy use.
Journal ArticleDOI
Spatial Distribution of U.S. Household Carbon Footprints Reveals Suburbanization Undermines Greenhouse Gas Benefits of Urban Population Density
TL;DR: Differences in the size, composition, and location of household carbon footprints suggest the need for tailoring of greenhouse gas mitigation efforts to different populations.
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