Abstract
In this study we explore the differences between carbon footprints of private households across three European countries. The assessment of CO2 emissions for housing, mobility and food is based on a survey of 844 inhabitants of rural and urban areas in Scotland, Czech Republic and Germany. The relevance of urban form, household structure, socio-demographics and lifestyle characteristics is investigated in relation to area specific conditions that influence the energy demand but also determine its enviormental impact. We can see significant differences in the carbon footprint across the case studies, which can to a certain extend be related to varying income levels in Scotland, Czech Republic and Germany. But of course, there are other influencing factors on different levels: different structural factors, such as the respective energy mix of a country, the availability of district heating and eco-friendly products such as green electricity, the urban form and household structure. Without the support of the built environment and public institutions, it is mostly difficult for individual households to translate their pro-environmental preferences into real behavior, but the data also reveals that the actors’ environmental values do have a direct influence on the level of CO2 emissions in some areas like food and flight emissions.
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Notes
- 1.
It should be noted that experiences with lifecycle assessment based product carbon footprints that we have been involved with reveal that currently we can only operate with estimates or rather generic data that do not account for product specific differences. For example it makes a big difference whether orange juice comes from Spain or from dry concentrate from Brazil, however most calculators use a generic emission value for ‘orange juice’ (cf. the German Product Carbon Footprint Pilot Project, www.pcf-projekt.de).
- 2.
- 3.
Extreme values and outliers were generally not excluded from analysis, only when they resulted from apparently false information. For the most part however the large variance of CO2 emissions represents reality. It was checked if differences between groups resulted from single extreme values. Such instances however did not emerge for the analysis of this chapter.
- 4.
- 5.
These results suggest that in the Czech case there is no connection between income and values as operationalized here. This most likely indicates a problem with transferring the lifestyle concept to the Czech cases study and needs further investigation. But for this particular purpose the use of the segmentation is still useful and seems legitimate, since the ecological values we are focusing on in this paper were tested as reliable for the groups.
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Acknowledgments
We are very grateful to all our survey participants for their contributions to this study. Jan Vávra, Miloslav Lapka, Eva Cudlınová, Tony Craig, Carlos Galan-Diaz, Anke Fischer and Mirjam Neebe facilitated the data collection and/or contributed to the analysis. The study was funded by the EU 7th Framework Programme through the project GILDED (Governance, Infrastructure, Lifestyle Dynamics and Energy Demand; grant no. 225383).
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Peters, V., Reusswig, F., Altenburg, C. (2013). European Citizens, Carbon Footprints and Their Determinants—Lifestyles and Urban Form. In: Khare, A., Beckman, T. (eds) Mitigating Climate Change. Springer Environmental Science and Engineering. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37030-4_12
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