Comparative Analysis on CO2 Emission Per Household in Daily Travel Based on Spatial Behavior Constraints

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  • 1. College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China;
    2. College of Public Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

Received date: 2010-10-21

  Revised date: 2011-04-20

  Online published: 1997-07-20

Abstract

The CO2 emission has been increasing significantly in recent years and resulted in severe effects on global environment, and most emitted in the urban region.Therefore, the key to reduce the greenhouse gas rests on the de-carbonization in urban area on transportation and other aspects, influenced by urban form.The authors argued, for urban environment geography and urban planning, how to realize the low-carbonization of urban spatial structure is one critical scientific proposition, including how to evaluate the environment performance by CO2 emission, compare and find out the low-carbon urban structure, urban form and urban spatial institution and so on.Focusing to issues, an emphasis had been placed to discuss the interactive mechanism between the individual behaviors and the various urban spatial structure of China in the transition period.The residential behaviors vary significantly different by communities with dissimilar spatial characteristics.Based on the first-hand investigation data of 600 households’daily travel surveys at Beijing in 2007, the CO2 emission per household and other characteristics in daily travels during one workday were calculated, all taken place in the context of the community-family constraint mechanism set by the authors.Subsequently, the CO2 emission was presented by communities, which had been catalogued into four types, including the inner company’s communities, the block neighborhood, the outer-suburb commercial housing communities and subsidized housing communities.Averagely, 2 529.59 g CO2 were emitted during one work-day daily travel per residential household at Beijing in 2007, and the divergence was remarkable in the community level.The inner company’s communities and the block neighborhood can induce their residents’low-carbon emission, whereas the outer-suburb commercial housing communities and subsidized housing communities allocated to low-income citizens often resulted in the high-carbon travels.This community-level divergence was illustrated by the mean comparison and tiered distribution, thus the variance and cluster analysis for travel variables are related to the carbon emission.The viewpoint was that the company and block community exerted notable and positive constraint effects on individual CO2 emission for their characteristics such as mixed land-use, jobs-housings balance and the completeness of facilities provision.In contrast, the communities developed in the appliance of the zoning theory would lead to long-distance travels, expand daily travels’scale and promote the individuals to use motor and other the high-carbon travel modes.What deserve attention is that, different from travel distance and travel mode, there is no significant divergence among communities with regards to the number of travels.In conclusion, the company system and zoning system, these two contradictive spatial structure model differ completely in carbon constraint-response and effect path, that is to say that these two main spatial patterns have distinctly different environmental performances.Regarding to the implication of policy, the government should rethink the function zoning, apply the company elements more, and promot the mix land use and comprehensive balance, which are all in accordance with new urbanism and compact city.At the same time, concerned with the governance of low-carbon community, asymmetric-designed policies and controls should be designed deliberatively in view of the household travel characteristic variation by communities.

Cite this article

CHAI Yan-Wei, XIAO Zuo-Peng, LIU Zhi-Lin . Comparative Analysis on CO2 Emission Per Household in Daily Travel Based on Spatial Behavior Constraints[J]. SCIENTIA GEOGRAPHICA SINICA, 2011 , 31(7) : 843 -849 . DOI: 10.13249/j.cnki.sgs.2011.07.843

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