A review of research on low-carbon school trips and their implications for human-environment relationship

Abstract

Low-carbon travel of urban residents is an important issue of public concern for sustainable development of global cities under climate change. The carbon emissions generated by school trips occupy a significant proportion of the carbon emissions of people's travel and are increasing year by year. In this paper, we review the progress in research on carbon emissions generated by school trips, the socio-spatial differences in school trips, and the influence mechanisms and optimization simulations of carbon emissions from school trips. Two major dilemmas are observed in the human-environment relationship of low-carbon school trips. First, the dramatic reconstruction of social space in cities and the imbalanced development of public service supply in the rapid urbanization process have led to the socio-spatial heterogeneity of the complex environment of school trips, thus making it difficult to form an effective model of governance of urban space that is conducive to low-carbon school trips. Second, the interaction mechanisms related to school trips remain unclear due to the dynamic and multi-scale nature of the geographic environment, which hinders a clear description of the effects of the built environment on low-carbon school trips and the in-depth simulation of the optimization path. Therefore, in future research, researchers should focus on multi-paradigm crossover and fusion, carry out prospective exploration on the human-environment interactions associated with low-carbon school trips, enrich the research methods of human-environment relationship, discuss the mechanisms of the complete built environment on low-carbon school trips, simulate the spatial nested structure and refine the governance model to meet the needs for low-carbon school trips.