Cities as nuclei of sustainability?
- We have assembled CO2 emission figures from collections of urban GHG emission estimates published in peer-reviewed journals or reports from research institutes and non-governmental organizations. Analyzing the scaling with population size, we find that the exponent is development dependent with a transition from super- to sub-linear scaling. From the climate change mitigation point of view, the results suggest that urbanization is desirable in developed countries. Further, we compare this analysis with a second scaling relation, namely the fundamental allometry between city population and area, and propose that density might be a decisive quantity too. Last, we derive the theoretical country-wide urban emissions by integration and obtain a dependence on the size of the largest city.
| Author details: | Diego RybskiORCiDGND, Dominik Edwin ReusserORCiDGND, Anna-Lena Winz, Christina Fichtner, Till Sterzel, Jürgen KroppORCiDGND |
|---|---|
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1177/0265813516638340 |
| ISSN: | 2399-8083 |
| ISSN: | 2399-8091 |
| Title of parent work (English): | Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science |
| Publisher: | Sage Publ. |
| Place of publishing: | London |
| Publication type: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Date of first publication: | 2017/05/01 |
| Publication year: | 2016 |
| Release date: | 2022/06/10 |
| Tag: | Scaling; allometry; cities; climate change; development process |
| Volume: | 44 |
| Issue: | 3 |
| Number of pages: | 16 |
| First page: | 425 |
| Last Page: | 440 |
| Funding institution: | Ministry for Education and Research of Germany under the rooftop of the Potsdam Research Cluster for Georisk Analysis, Environmental Change and Sustainability (PROGRESS) [03IS2191B] |
| Organizational units: | Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Institut für Umweltwissenschaften und Geographie |
| DDC classification: | 5 Naturwissenschaften und Mathematik / 55 Geowissenschaften, Geologie / 550 Geowissenschaften |
| Peer review: | Referiert |
