Greenhouse Gas Emissions Accounting of Urban Residential Consumption: A Household Survey Based Approach

Abstract

Devising policies for a low carbon city requires a careful understanding of the characteristics of urban residential lifestyle and consumption. The production-based accounting approach based on top-down statistical data has a limited ability to reflect the total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from residential consumption. In this paper, we present a survey-based GHG emissions accounting methodology for urban residential consumption, and apply it in Xiamen City, a rapidly urbanizing coastal city in southeast China. Based on this, the main influencing factors determining residential GHG emissions at the household and community scale are identified, and the typical profiles of low, medium and high GHG emission households and communities are identified. Up to 70% of household GHG emissions are from regional and national activities that support household consumption including the supply of energy and building materials, while 17% are from urban level basic services and supplies such as sewage treatment and solid waste management, and only 13% are direct emissions from household consumption. Housing area and household size are the two main factors determining GHG emissions from residential consumption at the household scale, while average housing area and building height were the main factors at the community scale. Our results show a large disparity in GHG emissions profiles among different households, with high GHG emissions households emitting about five times more than low GHG emissions households. Emissions from high GHG emissions communities are about twice as high as from low GHG emissions communities. Our findings can contribute to better tailored and targeted policies aimed at reducing household GHG emissions, and developing low GHG emissions residential communities in China.

Spatial analysis of gastric cancer morbidity in regions of rapid urbanization: a case study in Xiamen, China

“…Urban residents have a more fast pace of lifestyle and suffer much heavier work pressure, less physical activity and unhealthy living habits than rural residents. This lifestyle may cause obesity, cardiovascular and bad dietary habits, which are all risk factors of gastric cancer (Popkin 1999(Popkin , 2003Jemal and Siegel 2011;Li et al 2012;Lin et al 2013b).…”

Mapping the carbon footprint of EU regions

“…Lenzen et al 2006, Weber and Matthews 2008, Baiocchi et al 2010, conclusions have generally been drawn from individual-level assessments under a narrow spatial scope. Prior findings inform about the relevance of socio-economic effects such as income, household size, education, social status and degree of urbanization (Jones and Kammen 2014, Baiocchi et al 2010, Minx et al 2013, Lin et al 2013, Wilson et al 2013b, geographic effects such as temperature and geographic location (Tukker et al 2010, Newton andMeyer 2012) and technical effects such as the infrastructural context (Chancel and Piketty 2015, Tukker et al 2010, Sanne 2002. We would like to test whether influences that have been previously identified as important for consumption impacts may be apparent on the regional aggregated level as well (see table 1).…”

Carbon footprints of cities and other human settlements in the UK

“…Other CF concepts with different system boundaries exist. For example, the community-wide infrastructure CF includes all territorial GHGs as well as embodied GHG emissions associated with all trans-boundary infrastructure supply chains (Ramaswami et al 2008, Hillman and Ramaswami 2010, Chavez and Ramaswami 2011, Chavez et al 2012, Ramaswami et al 2012, Chavez and Ramaswami 2013, Lin et al 2013a, 2013b. Such trans-boundary footprints combining territorial and embodied GHG emissions are further discussed in the supplementary information (SI, available at stacks.iop.org/ ERL/8/035039/mmedia).…”