Per person, CO2 emissions in cities lower than national average

Consumption still major issue

Wendy Natt, Mar 25, 09.

City dwellers in most developed countries produce far fewer carbon emissions than national per capita levels, according to a recent study by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED). A blog article on US News & World Report reported on the study.

In London, per capita yearly emissions are 6.18 tons, whereas average per capita emissions for all of the UK are 11.19 tons. New York City’s per person emissions are 7.1 tons, while average US emissions are more than triple that, at 23.92 tons per person.

Carbon emissions are lower for city populations because they typically have access to mass transit and generally live and work in smaller spaces that use less energy per capita than suburban or rural structures, says the study report.

Highly industrial cities like Beijing and Shanghai are exceptions, and residents of those cities have a higher carbon footprint than the national average.

However, the IIED report notes that there are problems with allocating CO2 emissions solely to their direct sources. Globalization and the emergence of service-oriented, non-manufacturing economies in wealthier countries has been accompanied by the outsourcing of polluting, highly consumptive industries to rural areas or developing countries, yet city dwellers are the largest consumers by far of goods produced in these areas. Jim Hall at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the UK says that cities are “voracious consumers of industrial products,” a fact which underlies the “large discrepancy between production-based and consumption-based metrics of emissions.”

David Dodman of the IIED says “many cities have surprisingly low per capita emissions but what is clear is that most emissions come from the world’s wealthier nations. The real climate-change culprits are not the cities themselves but the high consumption lifestyles of people living across these wealthy countries,” he says.

This story was also reported in a Reuters article.

(photo credit: FaceMePLS)