Household time use, carbon footprints, and urban form: a review of the potential contributions of everyday living to the 1.5 °C climate target

By Dominik Wiedenhofer, Barbara Smetschka, L. Akenji, Mikko Jalas, H. Haberl. 2018

156 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The 1.5 °C mitigation challenge for urban areas goes far beyond decarbonizing the cities’ energy supply and needs to enable and incentivize carbon-free everyday living. Reviewing recent literature, we find that dense and mixed urban form enables lower direct emissions from mobility and housing, while income is the major driver of total household carbon footprints; importantly, these effects are not linear. The available urban infrastructure, services and societal arrangements, for example on work, all influence how households use their time, which goods and services they consume in everyday life and their subsequent carbon footprints and potential rebound effects. We conclude that changes in household consumption, time use and urban form are crucial for a 1.5 °C future. We further identify a range of issues for which a time use perspective could open up new avenues for research and policy.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment, Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8260ad9aceaa1a77c9b9c55307ed6ab7cc2d788f

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Citations in the corpus

Quantifying the potential for climate change mitigation of consumption options (2020, background): “When people live together, they tend to share space heating, cooling, lighting and the structure of the common living space, appliances, tools and equipment [24, 112, 113].”
Carbon footprints of 13 000 cities (2018, background): “Income is a strong predictor of CF (Wiedenhofer et al 2018).”
The unequal distribution of household carbon footprints in Europe and its link to sustainability (2020, background): “Prior studies have linked household expenditure surveys with environmental intensities to show the distribution of environmental footprints (Di Donato et al., 2015; Ivanova et al., 2017; Wiedenhofer et al., 2018) and the effect of (prospective) environmental policies on different household groups (C”