Greenhouse Gas Implications of Urban Sprawl in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area

Abstract

Suburban households living in spacious detached houses and owing multiple cars are often seen as main culprits for negative greenhouse consequences of urban sprawl. Consequently, the effects of sprawl have been mostly studied from the viewpoints of emissions from home energy consumption and private driving. Little attention has been paid to the changes in other consumption. In this paper, urban sprawl is linked to the proliferation of semi-detached and detached housing, described as a low-rise lifestyle, at the expense of apartment house living i.e., high-rise lifestyle. We analyze differences between the low-rise and the high-rise lifestyles and their environmental effects in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area, taking into account all consumption activities. Environmental effects are assessed by combining greenhouse gas intensities from a consumption-based environmentally-extended input-output (EE I-O) model with expenditure data. Then these carbon footprints are further elucidated with regression analysis. We find that low-rise lifestyles causes approximately 14% more emissions than high-rise lifestyles. However, the relative contributions of emissions from different sources, whether direct or indirect, are almost equal for both. Furthermore, when controlling the level of expenditure, the differences between the two lifestyles unexpectedly disappear and in certain cases are even reversed. We believe that our consumption-based approach facilitates the understanding of sprawling lifestyles and offers important insights for sustainable policy-design and urban planning.

Why do urbanites travel more than do others? A review of associations between urban form and long-distance leisure travel

“…For example, even when controlling for income, city center residents may cause higher indirect emissions through elevated consumption of goods and particularly services (Ala-Mantila et al 2014). Studies on consumption-based carbon footprints and energy requirements in the built environment have found that the total environmental pressure per capita is strikingly similar regardless of the residential location when income is controlled (Lenzen et al 2004, Ornetzeder et al 2008, Heinonen et al 2013b, Minx et al 2013, Wiedenhofer et al 2013, Ala-Mantila et al 2013, Ottelin et al 2015, Chen et al 2017, although the emissions caused by car use increase strongly with increasing distance to city center and decreasing urban density. Ottelin et al (2017) suggest that this is partly due to the rebound effect for reduced car-ownership and driving.…”

City Carbon Footprint Networks

“…The decomposition of "origin" and "destination" of embodied emissions by sector in the carbon map is just an additional step introduced by but consumption-based emissions (or CFs) of cities have been calculated with (multi-region) input-output analysis before [42][43][44][45][46]. The MRIO table for this study was derived from the Australian Industrial Ecology Virtual Laboratory [47] (see the heat map in the Figure S1), which can distinguish regions with a population of 10,000 residents (denoted SA2 region) [48].…”

City and Building Designers, and Climate Adaptation

“…The five most influential environmental issues raised in a project design process are: urban sprawl (17%), buildings' energy consumption (16%), mobility and transportation (14%), urban microclimates (11%), and natural resource management (10%). Apart from the last item, these energy-related issues can all be linked to climate mitigation actions because they directly or indirectly impact GHG emissions [47][48][49][50].…”