Helping EU cities and regions cut carbon emissions
Staff Writer |
In 1915, a Scottish town planner and social activist named Patrick Geddes encouraged the readers of his book on "Cities in Evolution" to think about the big picture when planning on a local level.
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His exhortation eventually morphed into the catchphrase, "Think globally, act locally," largely embraced by the environmental movement, especially in the United States.
And when US President Donald Trump announced he would withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement earlier this year, a range of US cities and states pledged to act on their own version of "Think globally, act locally," by cutting local and regional carbon emissions in keeping with the goals of the Paris deal.
But how does any one city or region know how big its carbon footprint really is? Researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) now have an answer to that question, at least for the European Union.
In "Mapping the carbon footprint of EU regions," first author Diana Ivanova and her colleagues describe how they used consumer expenditure surveys and environmental and trade details to calculate the first-ever carbon footprints for 177 regions in 27 EU countries.
These regional level footprints have been visualized as maps. Ivanova is a PhD candidate at NTNU's Industrial Ecology Programme.
The researchers also conducted similar analyses for land, water, and material use associated with consumption to create other interactive maps.
The EU's climate policies set binding targets for the region's 27 member states, but Ivanova says the different countries need "a finer spatial dimension of consumption-related and environmental information that moves beyond national averages."
The idea, she says, is to make sure that policies to cut carbon emissions actually do so, instead of moving the production of those emissions from one place to another.
Consider automobile manufacturing. "If we started importing cars instead of producing them domestically, there may be a drop in country-wide emissions, but the consumption emissions may stay the same -- or even increase, depending on the production efficiency," Ivanova said.
In theory, if a city or region has policies that encourage biking instead of driving, the researchers should be able to see the change in consumption patterns, with less car fuel consumed and fewer vehicles overall and a drop in consumption-based transport emissions, she said.
The researchers found that bigger cities and more populous regions have bigger carbon footprints, when they looked at the total household carbon footprint for a region. That measurement is informative, but the researchers also wanted to look at the effect of individuals, so they calculated a per-capita footprint.
This second calculation allowed the researchers to see that people with higher incomes are responsible for a larger per capita amount of carbon emissions, Ivanova said. Income level alone could explain 30 percent of the total household carbon emissions, she said.
"Different factors influence the way we consume," she said. "In our study, income appears to explain much of the variation in the regional factors, so essentially if we know how income changes over time, we can hypothesize about how emissions would follow."
The most important link to keep in mind, she says, is that rising incomes are expected to increase greenhouse gas emissions because people will have greater purchasing power.
"It makes sense that the richer you are, the greater your purchasing power and the environmental impacts associated with it," she said. "And the richer you are, the more you fly and drive." ■