A global overview of developments of urban and rural household GHG footprints from 2005 to 2015

Abstract

Household greenhouse-gas footprints (HGFs) are an important source of global emissions but can vary widely between urban and rural areas. These differences are important during the ongoing rapid, global, urbanization process. We provide a global overview of HGFs considering this urban-rural divide. We include 16 global regions, representing 80% of HGFs and analyze the drivers of urban and rural HGFs between 2005 and 2015. We do this by linking multi-regional input-output (MRIO) tables with household consumption surveys (HCSs) from 43 regions. Urban HGFs from high-income regions continue to dominate, at 75% of total HGFs over 2010–2015. However, we find a significant increase of rural HGFs (at 1% yr−1), reflecting a convergent trend between urban and rural HGFs. High-income regions were responsible for the majority of urban HGFs (USA: 27.8% and EU: 18.7% in 2015), primarily from transport and services, while rural HGFs were predominately driven in emerging regions (China: 24% and India: 21.8% in 2015) mainly driven by food and housing. We find that improving emission intensities do not offset the increase in HGFs from increasing consumption and population during the period. A broad transition of expenditure from food to housing in rural areas and to transport in urban areas highlights the importance of reducing the emission intensities of food, housing, and transportation. Counterintuitively, urbanization increased HGFs in emerging regions, resulting in a >1% increase in China, Indonesia, India and Mexico over the period, due to large migrations of people moving from rural to urban areas.