14 DAY TRIAL // It would appear that living in a cramped apartment that sits smack in the middle of a major urban area comes with perks that greenheads are the ones most likely to appreciate.
Not to beat about the bush, a paper recently published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology says that, according to evidence at hand, city dwellers have a smaller carbon footprint than people living in the suburbs usually do.
The University of California, Berkeley researchers who authored the paper explain that, in order to determine the ecological footprint of folks living in the city and that of people living in the suburbs, they looked at several factors including energy, transportation, food, goods and services.
These factors were all chosen due to the fact that they are all linked to greenhouse gas emissions, the specialists go on to detail.
According to Green Car Congress, the University of California, Berkeley researchers found that the mean value of the carbon footprint of households located in the center of a fairly large and densely populated urban area in the United States was half the national average.
By comparison, households that sat some 45 miles (roughly 72.5 kilometers) away from an urban area with high density were documented to have a mean carbon footprint twice as big as the national average, the same source details.
This is probably because the people living in these homes drive their cars over longer distances, have bigger homes that use more resources and also grow various crops.
To put things into perspective, it must be said that the typical U.S. household is estimated to dump 48 tons of carbon emissions into the atmosphere on a yearly basis.
“We find consistently lower HCF [household carbon footprints] in urban core cities and higher carbon footprints in outlying suburbs,” the scientists write in the Abstract to their paper.
This means that, as an area's population increases, emissions are reduced. As the researchers put it, “Population density exhibits a weak but positive correlation with HCF until a density threshold is met, after which range, mean, and standard deviation of HCF decline.”
By the looks of it, a population density of about 50,000 persons per square mile (50,000 persons per 2.58 square kilometers) need be linked to annual emissions of about 30 tonnes of carbon dioxide per household.
The bad news is that whatever carbon emissions households in the center of major urban areas do not emit throughout the course of an entire year are compensated by what the suburbs cough out.
Hence, suburbs can be argued to wipe out the climate benefits that come with the fact that households in the city are fairly environmentally friendly.
“While population density contributes to relatively low HCF in the central cities of large metropolitan areas, the more extensive suburbanization in these regions contributes to an overall net increase in HCF compared to smaller metropolitan areas,” the University of California, Berkeley researchers say.
“Suburbs alone account for about 50% of total U.S. HCF. Differences in the size, composition, and location of household carbon footprints suggest the need for tailoring of greenhouse gas mitigation efforts to different populations,” they stress.