2016 AllinsonHouseholdCarbon.pdf (660.46 kB)
Measurement and analysis of household carbon: the case of a UK city
journal contribution
posted on 2015-12-16, 11:10 authored by David AllinsonDavid Allinson, Katherine Irvine, J.L. Edmondson, A. Tiwary, Graeme Hill, Jonathan Morris, M.C. Bell, Z.G. Davies, Steven FirthSteven Firth, Jill Fisher, K.J. Gaston, J.R. Leake, Nicola McHugh, A. Namdeo, Mark Rylatt, Kevin LomasKevin LomasThere is currently a lack of data recording the carbon and emissions inventory at household level. This paper presents a multi-disciplinary, bottom-up approach for estimation and analysis of the carbon emissions, and the organic carbon (OC) stored in gardens, using a sample of 575 households across a UK city. The annual emission of carbon dioxide emissions from energy used in the homes was measured, personal transport emissions were assessed through a household survey and OC stores estimated from soil sampling and vegetation surveys. The results showed that overall carbon patterns were skewed with highest emitting third of the households being responsible for more than 50% of the emissions and around 50% of garden OC storage. There was diversity in the relative contribution that gas, electricity and personal transport made to each household’s total and different patterns were observed for high, medium and low emitting households. Targeting households with high carbon emissions from one source would not reliably identify them as high emitters overall. While carbon emissions could not be offset by growing trees in gardens, there were considerable amounts of stored OC in gardens which ought to be protected. Exploratory analysis of the multiple drivers of emissions was conducted using a combination of primary and secondary data. These findings will be relevant in devising effective policy instruments for combatting city scale green-house gas emissions from domestic end-use energy demand.
Funding
This work is supported by the EPSRC projects Measurement, Modelling, Mapping and Management 4M: An Evidence Based Methodology for Understanding and Shrinking the Urban Carbon Footprint (grant reference EP/F007604/1) and Self Conserving Urban Environments (SECURE, grant reference EP/I002154/1) funded under the Sustainable Urban Environments programme.
History
School
- Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering
Published in
Applied EnergyVolume
164Pages
871-881Citation
ALLINSON, D. ...et al., 2016. Measurement and analysis of household carbon: the case of a UK city. Applied Energy, 164, pp. 871–881.Publisher
© The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.Version
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Acceptance date
2015-11-29Publication date
2016-01-07Copyright date
2016Notes
This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).ISSN
0306-2619Publisher version
Language
- en