Twelve metropolitan carbon footprints: A preliminary comparative global assessment

By Benjamin Sovacool, Marilyn A. Brown. 2010

379 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A dearth of available data on carbon emissions and comparative analysis between metropolitan areas make it difficult to confirm or refute best practices and policies. To help provide benchmarks and expand our understanding of urban centers and climate change, this article offers a preliminary comparison of the carbon footprints of 12 metropolitan areas. It does this by examining emissions related to vehicles, energy used in buildings, industry, agriculture, and waste. The carbon emissions from these sources—discussed here as the metro area's partial carbon footprint—provide a foundation for identifying the pricing, land use, help metropolitan areas throughout the world respond to climate change. The article begins by exploring a sample of the existing literature on urban morphology and climate change and explaining the methodology used to calculate each area's carbon footprint. The article then depicts the specific carbon footprints for Beijing, Jakarta, London, Los Angeles, Manila, Mexico City, New Delhi, New York, Sao Paulo, Seoul, Singapore, and Tokyo and compares these to respective national averages. It concludes by offering suggestions for how city planners and policymakers can reduce the carbon footprint of these and possibly other large urban areas.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c816e06c95c94ba462729cd4eb5193e32d8f6acd

How researchers see this paper

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In Environmental Engineering

1. Daniel Moran
2. Keiichiro Kanemoto
3. Zhu Liu
4. Richard Wood
5. Yong Geng
6. Sai Liang
7. Jukka Heinonen
8. S. Junnila

In Transportation

1. Jukka Heinonen
2. S. Junnila
3. Richard Wood
4. Karen C. Seto
5. Zhu Liu

Citations in the corpus

• Features, trajectories and driving forces for energy-related GHG emissions from Chinese mega cites: The case of Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Chongqing (2012, background): “at SciVerse ScienceDirect Contents lists available Energy journal homepage: www.elsevier .com/locate/energy Features, trajectories and driving forces for energy-related GHG emissions from Chinese mega cites: The case of Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Chongqing Zhu Liu a,b, Sai Liang c, Yong Geng…”
• Carbon footprints of 13 000 cities (2018, background): “(Kennedy et al 2009) and (Sovacool and Brown 2010) provided some of the first such studies, calculating footprints of 10 and 12 megacities respectively.”
• GHG footprint of major cities in India (2015, background): “The transition to a very low carbon economy needs elementary changes in technology, regulatory frameworks, infrastructure, business practices, consumption patterns and lifestyles [44,45].”
• Carbon footprint: current methods of estimation (2011, background): “Sovacool and Brown (2010) extend the boundary to include emissions from agriculture and waste, wherever applicable in addition to tiers I and II that include 154 Environ Monit Assess (2011) 178:135–160”
• Situated lifestyles: I. How lifestyles change along with the level of urbanization and what the greenhouse gas implications are—a study of Finland (2013, background): “…urban density leads lower private vehicle usage and housing energy needs, the life in denser agglomerations may be more consumption intense up to the point where the overall emissions exceed those caused by residents of less dense areas (Sovacool and Brown 2010, Heinonen 2012, Lenzen et al 2004).”