Assessing the Potential of Climate Change Mitigation Actions in Three Different City Types in Finland

Abstract

Abstract:As the effects of global warming have become more evident, ambitious short-term greenhouse gas emission reduction targets have been set in recent years. Many cities worldwide have adopted an active approach to climate change mitigation, but policy makers are not always knowledgeable of the true effects of their planned mitigation action. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of different mitigation strategies in achieving low-carbon urban communities. The assessment is conducted via means of consumption based hybrid life-cycle assessment, which allows the reduction potential to be analyzed from the perspective of an individual resident of the urban community. The assessed actions represent strategies that are both adopted by the case cities and possible to implement with current best practices in Finland. The four assessed actions comprise: (1) dense urban structure with less private driving; (2) the use of energy production based on renewable sources; (3) new low-energy residential construction; and (4) improving the energy efficiency of existing buildings. The findings show that the effectiveness depends greatly on the type of city, although in absolute terms the most significant reduction potential lies with lowering the fossil fuel dependence of the local energy production.

What can we learn from consumption-based carbon footprints at different spatial scales? Review of policy implications

“…In addition to carbon pricing and urban planning, there are behavioral and technological policy suggestions for cities in the literature. In particular local renewable energy production is promoted (Kyrö et al 2012, Li et al 2015, Maraseni et al 2016a. Several authors highlight that cleaner energy production not only reduces the CBCF of the city residents, but that the benefits spread outside the city region as well when the goods and services produced within the city are consumed by the residents of other areas (Hu et al 2016, Laine et al 2017, Lin et al 2017.…”

Reducing Carbon Emissions from Shopping Trips: Evidence from China

“…Some focused on reducing carbon emissions through technological measures and policies, including the development of new energy vehicles [14], improvement in energy efficiency [15], congestion charges [16,17], and the use of public transport [18]. Other studies have found that a dense urban structure can be an effective way to reduce carbon emissions [19][20][21][22]. However, the current level of understanding about the effect of urban form on carbon emissions should be strengthened, as others have found ambiguous relationships between land use and transport [23][24][25][26].…”