Forces Driving Urban Greenhouse Gas Emissions

The contribution of urban areas to global greenhouse gas emissions has received substantial recent attention, in order both to allocate responsibility for climate change and to identify appropriate mitigation responses. The paper summarises these arguments, highlighting the challenges involved in creating an accurate and comparative measure of this. It shows how geography, urban form, and the urban economy influence the emissions from any given city. It then examines the use of ‘production’-based and ‘consumption’-based approaches for measuring emissions, and shows how particular lifestyles can be seen as the underlying drivers for manufacturing, food production, deforestation, and other activities that generate greenhouse gases.

[1]  Lloyd Wright,et al.  Climate Change Mitigation and Transport in Developing Nations , 2005 .

[2]  F. M. Pulselli,et al.  The problem of assigning responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions , 2004 .

[3]  J. Guzmán,et al.  Population dynamics and climate change , 2009 .

[4]  G. Peters From production-based to consumption-based national emission inventories , 2008 .

[5]  R. Kates,et al.  Methods for estimating greenhouse gases from local places , 1998 .

[6]  D. Satterthwaite The Earthscan Reader in Sustainable Cities , 1999 .

[7]  M. Betsill,et al.  Cities and climate change , 2002 .

[8]  W. Adger,et al.  Scales of governance and environmental justice for adaptation and mitigation of climate change , 2001 .

[9]  Christopher Kennedy,et al.  A Spatial Analysis of Residential Greenhouse Gas Emissions in the Toronto Census Metropolitan Area , 2007 .

[10]  Jeffrey Kenworthy,et al.  Gasoline Consumption and Cities: A Comparison of U.S. Cities with a Global Survey , 1989 .

[11]  S. Dhakal Climate Change and Cities: The Making of a Climate Friendly Future , 2008 .

[12]  M. Gottdiener,et al.  Key concepts in urban studies , 2005 .

[13]  H. L. Miller,et al.  Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis , 2007 .

[14]  A. Ramaswami,et al.  A demand-centered, hybrid life-cycle methodology for city-scale greenhouse gas inventories. , 2008, Environmental science & technology.

[15]  Glen P. Peters,et al.  The contribution of Chinese exports to climate change , 2008 .

[16]  Emilio Lèbre La Rovere,et al.  Local perspectives in the control of greenhouse gas emissions – The case of Rio de Janeiro , 2007 .

[17]  D. Satterthwaite The implications of population growth and urbanization for climate change , 2009 .

[18]  D. Dodman Blaming cities for climate change? An analysis of urban greenhouse gas emissions inventories , 2009 .

[19]  Mike Berners-Lee,et al.  How Bad Are Bananas?: The carbon footprint of everything , 2010 .

[20]  E. Hertwich,et al.  Carbon footprint of nations: a global, trade-linked analysis. , 2009, Environmental science & technology.

[21]  D. Satterthwaite Cities' contribution to global warming: notes on the allocation of greenhouse gas emissions , 2008 .

[22]  Xuemei Bai,et al.  Industrial Ecology and the Global Impacts of Cities , 2007 .

[23]  R. Ewing,et al.  Growing Cooler: The Evidence on Urban Development and Climate Change , 2008 .

[24]  Peter Droege,et al.  Urban Energy Transition: From Fossil Fuels to Renewable Power , 2008 .

[25]  Corinne Le Quéré,et al.  Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis , 2013 .