An integrated urban neighbourhood GHG mitigation analysis as a means to advance urban climate management

Abstract

Worldwide, cities collaborate in the global effort to manage climate change mitigation. As cities are highly spatially and socially diverse entities, any city encompass a wide range of ‘GHG emissions lifestyles’ and therefore GHG mitigation strategies should reflect the urban diversity. Advancing sub-urban analysis can improve GHG mitigation by relating efforts and limited resources to the unique characteristics and functioning of different parts of the city. This paper emphasizes the need to relate the unique characteristics of key emissions categories at the residential neighbourhood level to its potential mitigation. It analyses the carbon footprint of households in residential neighbourhoods in the city of Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Israel, focusing on three major direct and indirect emissions categories: electricity, transportation, and food consumption. While the average city scale emissions found to be 4.6 ton of CO2e per capita, different neighbourhoods emissions ranged between 3.1 tons and 6.8 tons. Exploring the linkages to various explanatory, socio-spatial drivers found range of emissions related characteristics of different neighbourhoods. Finally, examining the potential contribution of implementing various GHG mitigation measures, revealed that the integration of technological, policy and behavioural measures may result with range of footprint reduction in different parts of the city due to the neighbourhoods' socio-spatial characteristics.