Associations between individuals’ daily carbon footprints and exposures to air pollution, noise, and greenspace in space and time

Abstract

To mitigate the catastrophic impacts of climate change, many measures and strategies have been designed and implemented to encourage people to change their daily behaviors for a low-carbon society transition. However, most people generate carbon emissions through their daily activities in space and time. They are also exposed to multiple environmental factors (e.g., air pollution, noise, and greenspace). Changing people’s behaviors to reduce carbon emissions can also influence their multiple environmental exposures and further influence their health outcomes. Thus, this study seeks to examine the associations between individuals’ daily carbon footprints and their exposures to multiple environmental factors (i.e., air pollution, noise, and greenspace) across different spatial and temporal contexts using individual-level data collected by portable real-time sensors, an activity-travel diary, and a questionnaire from four communities in Hong Kong. The results first indicated that individuals’ carbon footprints of daily activities varied across different spatial and temporal contexts, with home and nighttime having the highest estimated carbon footprints. We also found that activity carbon footprints have a positive association with PM_2.5, which is particularly strong at home and from morning to nighttime, and mixed associations with noise (positive at home and nighttime, while negative in other places and during travel, from morning to afternoon). Besides, carbon footprints also have consistent negative associations with shrubland and woodland across different spatial and temporal contexts. The findings can provide essential insights into effective measures for promoting the transition to a low-carbon society.

Keywords

Activity carbon footprints / Individual-level data / Portable real-time sensors / Multiple environmental exposures / Low-carbon society transition

Ethics approval statements

The survey was reviewed and approved by the Survey and Behavioural Research Ethics Committee of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Protocol SBRE-19–123 approved on January 8, 2020; Protocol SBRE(R)−21–005 approved on November 1, 2021). Informed consent was obtained from all participants before data were collected from them.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Jianwei Huang: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Visualization, Validation, Methodology, Formal analysis, Conceptualization. Mei-Po Kwan: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Supervision, Resources, Methodology, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization.

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by grants from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (General Research Fund Grants No. 14605920, 14611621, 14606922, 14603724; Collaborative Research Fund Grant No. C4023–20GF; Research Matching Grants RMG 8601219, 8601242, 3110151); RGC Postdoctoral Fellowship No.pdfS2425–4H01), a grant from the Research Committee on Research Sustainability of Major Research Grants Council Funding Schemes (Grant No. 3133235) of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), and a grant from the Vice-Chancellor’s One-off Discretionary Fund (Smart and Sustainable Cities: City of Commons) (4930787) of CUHK. The funders had no role in the study design, data collection, data analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. We thank the editor and the reviewers for their helpful comments. In addition, we would also like to express our gratitude to all the participants for their participation in the study.

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2024.100260.

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