Urban and rural carbon footprints in developing countries

Mairéad Connolly, Yuli Shan*, Benedikt Bruckner, Ruoqi Li, Klaus Hubacek*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

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Abstract

A good understanding of household carbon emissions is an important part of forming climate mitigation strategies to achieve the goals set out in the Paris Agreement. Numerous studies have been carried out on emissions from household consumption and the inequality between urban and rural areas in high-income developed countries, but there is a lack of in-depth analysis of such differences in developing countries. Our research details household carbon footprints (CFs) of four urban and four rural income categories for 90 developing countries, by linking global expenditure data to the environmentally extended multi-regional input-output approach. We show that there are large inequalities between urban and rural areas in developing countries. The average per capita CF in urban areas tends to be larger than that of rural inhabitants ranging from twice as large to nine times larger. We find that electricity consumption and transport are the largest contributors to the total CF in all expenditure groups. High-income rural households have an average per capita CF of 12.38 t CO2 which is 25% higher than the equivalent urban high-income group, which deviates from the literature looking at a subset of cases. Our study contributes to the existing research on CFs by providing knowledge on the consumption patterns and related carbon emissions of urban and rural populations in these understudied parts of the world.

Original languageEnglish
Article number084005
Number of pages10
JournalEnvironmental Research Letters
Volume17
Issue number8
Early online date15 Jul 2022
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Aug 2022

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd.

Keywords

  • carbon accounting
  • greenhouse gas emissions
  • household consumption
  • inequality
  • input-output analysis

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
  • General Environmental Science
  • Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

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