Calculating carbon emissions from personal travelling: insights from a top-down analysis of key calculators
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Calculating carbon emissions from personal travelling: insights from a top-down analysis of key calculators Girish Bekaroo 1
&
Divesh Roopowa 1 & Abubakar Zakari 2 & Debbie Niemeier 3
Received: 13 June 2020 / Accepted: 6 October 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Personal travelling unfavourably contributes to the emissions of greenhouse gases, which adversely causes long-term damage to the climate. In order to reduce the associated negative impacts of such activities on the environment, there is a wide consensus that enhancements and innovations in the efficiency of vehicles will not be enough, but behavioural changes are needed. For this, individuals should be able to measure their travel-related carbon emissions, and such emissions could be determined by using personal carbon footprint calculators, which proliferated during the previous decade. However, various research questions related to such calculators are yet to be answered in published literature. As such, this paper investigates how key transport-based calculators account for emissions from personal transport-related activities following a top-down analysis. In this endeavour, ten such calculators are investigated through a set of formulated research questions to analyse their scope, calculation approach used, transparency, consistency of results, communication methods utilized and platform differences. Results revealed that the calculators have varying granularity, have limited transparency, provide significantly inconsistent results in some cases and are not fully engaging end users. Based on limitations identified, recommendations have been proposed through a taxonomy to guide policy-makers towards improving such tools. Keywords Personal travelling . Carbon footprint calculators . Carbon emissions . Top-down analysis . Taxonomy of recommendations
Introduction Transport, which refers to the movement of people, animals or goods from one place to another, is considered a nonseparable part of the contemporary society. It is a fundamental component for economic growth and human welfare, encompassing key categories including air, road, rail and marine transportation. In order to meet the needs of highly mobile and dispersed populations, hundreds of modes of Responsible Editor: Philippe Garrigues * Girish Bekaroo [email protected] 1
School of Science and Technology, Middlesex University Mauritius, Flic-en-Flac, Mauritius
2
Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
3
A.James Clark School of Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA
transportation have been designed and developed for use by human beings (U.S. Department of State 2014). Transportation activities have rapidly increased around the world (Uherek et al. 2010; Wang et al. 2011; Ribeiro et al. 2007; Arora et al. 2011; Dargay et al. 2007), and robust growth in the sector is also expected to continue during the coming decades (Yan et al. 2014). Among the tra
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