Effects of COVID-19 on mobility GHG emissions: Case of the city of Lahti, Finland

Abstract

The coronavirus disease COVID-19 has spread worldwide since early 2020, and it has impacted mobility emissions due to mobility restrictions and e.g. increased remote work. This creates a good opportunity to assess how mobility emissions have reduced due to COVID-19. This research is based on data related to mobility distances and modes that have been automatically collected by using a mobile phone application in the city of Lahti, Finland. The results show that mobility decreased in total by approximately 40% during the first wave of COVID-19 in spring 2020. The global warming potential decreased at the same time by approximately 36%. In addition, a considerable shift in modal shares could be seen. The relative modal share of passenger cars increased by 6 percentage points while the share of public transport decreased by 18 percentage points. Despite the considerable reduction, further reductions in emissions from mobility are needed to meet the 1.5 degree climate targets in the urban mobility sector. However, further reductions can be reached also by increasingly using renewable mobility energy sources.

How do actions to decarbonise the energy and mobility sectors affect consumption-based carbon footprints? A case of historic and predicted actions in a suburb in Finland

“…The survey was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, which affected the survey results, especially those regarding mobility issues. During the first wave of COVID-19 in the spring of 2020, mobility decreased by approximately 40% in Lahti, and the GWP of mobility decreased by 36% (Kareinen et al 2022). Mobility in Lahti may have increased slightly since the first wave of COVID-19, but we assumed that it did not increase to the same level as before the pandemic in the autumn of 2021 when this study was conducted.…”

The Pandemic Effect on GHG Emission Variation at the Sub-National Level and Translation into Policy Opportunities

“…So far, COVID-19-related GHG emission reduction has been investigated through sub-national GHG emission inventories focusing on CO 2 (Hartono et al, 2021;Huo et al, 2022;Liu et al, 2020Liu et al, , 2022Nalini et al, 2022), energy sector (Rugani and Caro, 2020;Samani et al, 2021), limited periods of time (Bolaño-Ortiz et al, 2020;Nalini et al, 2022), specific activities such as transport (Camargo-Caicedo et al, 2021;Durán-Grados et al, 2020;Gamba et al, 2021;Kareinen et al, 2022;Mannarini et al, 2022) or household consumption (Long et al, 2021;Rojas et al, 2022), or even without providing a sectoral detail, thus with limited informative potential (Hu et al, 2022). As the pandemic can represent an opportunity to strengthen the sustainability of territorial systems (Lehmann et al, 2021;Tibrewal and Venkataraman, 2022), we investigate this opportunity in terms of GHG emission, and take advantage of it to show the relevance of the territorial context in shaping the emission trends.…”