Influence of Population Income on Energy Consumption and CO2 Emissions in Buildings of Cities

Fco Javier Zarco-Soto,Pedro J Zarco-Periñán,Irene M Zarco-Soto

doi:10.3390/su131810230

Fco Javier Zarco-Soto, Pedro J Zarco-Periñán + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su131810230

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Journal: Sustainability	Publication Date: Sep 13, 2021
Citations: 2	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Universidad de Sevilla

Abstract

More than half of the world’s population lives in cities. A large part of the emissions and energy consumption corresponds to buildings, both in the residential sector and in the service sector. This means that a large part of the measures taken by governments to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions are focused on this sector. With this background, this paper studies energy consumption in city buildings and the CO2 emissions they produce. It only makes use of publicly available data. The analysis is made from the point of view of income per inhabitant, and the results are obtained per inhabitant and household. To facilitate the analysis of the results, an index has been defined. The main contributions of this work are to analyze energy consumption and emissions due to buildings, study them from the point of view of the income of their inhabitants, and consider cities individually. The proposed methodology has been applied to the case of Spain. A total of 145 Spanish cities that have more than 50,000 inhabitants have been studied. The results show that the higher the income, the higher the consumption and emissions. Electricity consumptions are almost inelastic, while those of thermal origin are greatly influenced by the level of income. Regarding CO2 emissions, the percentage of emissions of electrical origin with respect to total emissions is higher than that of thermal origin. In addition, the lower the income, the higher the percentage of emissions of electrical origin.

Highlights

Among the main greenhouse gases (GHG), CO2 is the most worrying since it represents 80% of total emissions
The cities have been separated into five groups according to the criteria established in Section 4.1 based on the national minimum wage according (NMW)
The energy consumption considered is that normally used in buildings: electrical and thermal in the form of natural gas

Summary

Introduction

Among the main greenhouse gases (GHG), CO2 is the most worrying since it represents 80% of total emissions. A very important part of this energy consumption and of these emissions corresponds to buildings, both in the residential sector and in the service sector. They account for 40% of emissions and 36% of energy consumption [2]. More than half of the world’s population lives in cities They consume between 60 and 80% of energy and produce 75% of carbon emissions [3]. It is clear how important cities are to achieve efficient use of energy and a reduction in GHG emissions. Within the United Nations sustainable development goals, goal 11 focuses on them, it is present in goals 7, 12, and 13 [3]

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