High-resolution maps of carbon emissions have revealed how our day-to-day patterns of behaviour, such as commuting, affect the release of greenhouse gases, and could help governments quickly see the impact of green policies.
at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, and his colleagues combined data from various sources to provide daily global maps of carbon emissions at a 10-kilometre resolution.
The researchers used country level emission inventories, data from industrial sites and power plants, satellite measurements of nitrogen dioxide and modelling estimates.
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This allowed them to assess differences between weekend and weekday carbon emissions from ground transportation, finding that emissions fall at the weekend due to a lack of commuters.
The weekend-weekday difference was smaller in 2020 compared with 2019 due to lockdowns and home-working policies implemented during the coronavirus pandemic. Covid-19 has reduced weekday carbon emissions, Liu says, making the 鈥渓ifestyle of weekdays more like weekends鈥�.
Liu and his colleagues plan to update the data set regularly, giving a near-real-time picture of how changes in policies affect emissions. at Imperial College London says such information could potentially sway governments towards encouraging long-term flexible working patterns.
There鈥檚 鈥渃learly a tension鈥�, Gambhir says, between governments鈥� desires to buoy the commercial activities of city centres and their need to meet legislative net-zero carbon emission targets. 鈥淚t can often take years to see what the impact of a particular policy might be in terms of emissions reductions,鈥� he says. 鈥淚t might well be that this kind of data is a countervailing force.鈥�
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