TY  - JOUR
A1  - Gudipudi, Venkata Ramana
A1  - Fluschnik, Till
A1  - Ros, Anselmo Garcia Cantu
A1  - Walther, Carsten
A1  - Kropp, Jürgen
T1  - City density and CO2 efficiency
JF  - Energy policy : the international journal of the political, economic, planning, environmental and social aspects of energy
N2  - Cities play a vital role in the global climate change mitigation agenda. City population density is one of the key factors that influence urban energy consumption and the subsequent GHG emissions. However, previous research on the relationship between population density and GHG emissions led to contradictory results due to urban/rural definition conundrum and the varying methodologies for estimating GHG emissions. This work addresses these ambiguities by employing the City Clustering Algorithm (CCA) and utilizing the gridded CO2 emissions data. Our results, derived from the analysis of all inhabited areas in the US, show a sub-linear relationship between population density and the total emissions (i.e. the sum of on-road and building emissions) on a per capita basis. Accordingly, we find that doubling the population density would entail a reduction in the total CO2 emissions in buildings and on-road sectors typically by at least 42%. Moreover, we find that population density exerts a higher influence on on-road emissions than buildings emissions. From an energy consumption point of view, our results suggest that on-going urban sprawl will lead to an increase in on-road energy consumption in cities and therefore stresses the importance of developing adequate local policy measures to limit urban sprawl. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
KW  - Population density
KW  - City boundaries
KW  - Urban energy
KW  - Sectoral emissions
KW  - Urban sprawl
Y1  - 2016
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2016.01.015
SN  - 0301-4215
SN  - 1873-6777
VL  - 91
SP  - 352
EP  - 361
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Oxford
ER  -