The amount of built-up area per capita is the strongest driver of greenhouse gas emissions, after the amount of gross domestic product (GDP). This is shown by a study by a research team led by the ecologist Helmut Haberl in the journal “Nature Communications”, in which this effect could be calculated in detail for the first time. According to the researcher, this also provides a new, strong argument to curb the widespread consumption of land in this country.
It is a kind of political chicken-and-egg debate when it comes to whether new infrastructure in the form of new traffic routes will ultimately generate more traffic or bring improvements.
Construction activities further exacerbate the situation
It is clear that economic development – which is reflected in, among other things, the gross domestic product – is very closely related to the expansion of a country’s infrastructure. The scientists around Haberl, who work at the Institute for Social Ecology (SEC) at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (Boku) Vienna, wanted to know more about it. Based on detailed data on land use in 113 countries, they formed indicators of how built structures are related to energy consumption and regional CO₂ emissions.
“Developing these indicators was really time consuming and difficult,” says Haberl. A manageable number of figures were needed to determine how “settlements and roads are distributed, so to speak, on a map”. Whether there is one large and many smaller cities in a country, as in Austria, or whether the distances between metropolitan areas are large or small, results in very different infrastructure patterns. These values were then compared to GDP, for example. The team then calculated how strongly the various factors are related to CO2 emissions.
Construction “politically highly relevant”
Using complex statistical methods, Haberl and colleagues showed that built-up area per capita in a country consistently had the second largest impact on emissions after GDP. Even if the researchers calculated the correspondingly large correlation between GDP and CO2, the construction found “a very strong side effect,” Haberl stressed.
“From my point of view, this is very relevant politically,” says the researcher. Land use in Austria has long been a hot topic. Just last week, a new attempt to agree on an “Austrian Soil Protection Strategy” failed. “This again demonstrates the low priority of climate protection,” Haberl said.
Energy demand not only during construction
The new study shows how strongly climate and soil protection are linked. More buildings not ‘only’ lead to disfigurement of the landscape, but more or less automatically also leads to excessive greenhouse gas emissions. This is “plausible, since roads, highways, parking lots and buildings require energy for their construction and operation, leading to high CO2 emissions in our energy systems dominated by fossil fuels.
Need more soil protection
Additional built-up area also means greater heated or cooled area in buildings and longer distances between destinations, which increases the demand for energy in buildings and in transport,” said co-author Felix Creutzig of the Climate Change Center Berlin Brandenburg and the Mercator Research Institute. (MCC) Berlin in a broadcast.
Conversely, “soil protection also helps to limit resource consumption. That is, as it were, the new verdict from the study,” says Haberl. It should also be remembered that the effort required to “low carbon” a system increases accordingly the larger the system as a whole is.
Source: Krone
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