Abstract
To address the failure of sustainable transport policies to bring about significant change, researchers have proposed to ‘tame the few’, targeting the minority sectors of the population responsible for a disproportionate amount of emissions. At the same time, activity- and practice-based approaches are increasingly proposed as the way forward for transport and energy research. In this article, we develop an approach inspired by both developments, by focusing on the car- and carbon-intensive food shopping practices of the 20% of households with the longest car travel distance as recorded in the National Travel Survey of Great Britain (NTS 2002-2010) for this activity. We present a four-cluster typology of gross polluters, highlighting the crucial role of frequency and the existence of a small but growing group of low-income, older households with ‘Shopping intensive’ travel patterns. These results suggest that, while the households with the worst climate impact have a distinct socio-demographic profile, broader sections of the population are recruited into gross polluting patterns of food shopping travel. Also, while built environment policies remain key, significantly reducing transport emissions in this area requires a broader approach, taking into account the relationships between food shopping and eating practices.
Highlights
With transport the only sector where greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have increased since 1990 in the EU-27 (EC, 2012), there is clearly a chronic gap between goals and accomplishments in the field of sustainable transport policy
We refer to this subsample as the ‘analysis sample’. The reason for this stratification is that we aim to investigate what it is in the households’ weekly food shopping patterns that explains long car driver distances relative to the distribution typical of that type of area. This does not mean denying the impact of urbanisation: much to the contrary, we consider it so important that one needs to control for it to bring to light differences in patterns of food shopping
We have presented a study inspired by previous research on the unequal distribution of GHG emissions, interpreting the results in light of social practices research
Summary
With transport the only sector where greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have increased since 1990 in the EU-27 (EC, 2012), there is clearly a chronic gap between goals and accomplishments in the field of sustainable transport policy. As Gössling and Cohen argue, ‘‘a minor share of highly mobile travellers, mostly from higher income classes, are responsible for a significant share of the overall distances travelled, as well as emissions associated with this transport” While the skewed distribution of transport GHG emissions could be construed as an opportunity to take advantage of, it is currently remarkably absent from the transport policy agenda. This in turn is a barrier to the achievement of sustainable transport. The most recent and comprehensive study for Britain (Büchs and Schnepf, 2013) finds that household size is positively associated with household transport emissions but negatively correlated with per capita emissions, indicating economies of scale. Given the strong link between travel distances and emissions, the relationships mirror those with travel distances (Holz-Rau et al, 2014)
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