Carbon emissions of infrastructure development.
Identifying strategies for reconciling human development and climate change mitigation requires an adequate understanding of how infrastructures contribute to well-being and greenhouse gas emissions. While direct emissions from infrastructure use are well-known, information about indirect emissions from their construction is highly fragmented. Here, we estimated the carbon footprint of the existing global infrastructure stock in 2008, assuming current technologies, to be 122 (-20/+15) Gt CO2. The average per-capita carbon footprint of infrastructures in industrialized countries (53 (± 6) t CO2) was approximately 5 times larger that that of developing countries (10 (± 1) t CO2). A globalization of Western infrastructure stocks using current technologies would cause approximately 350 Gt CO2 from materials production, which corresponds to about 35-60% of the remaining carbon budget available until 2050 if the average temperature increase is to be limited to 2 °C, and could thus compromise the 2 °C target. A promising but poorly explored mitigation option is to build new settlements using less emissions-intensive materials, for example by urban design; however, this strategy is constrained by a lack of bottom-up data on material stocks in infrastructures. Infrastructure development must be considered in post-Kyoto climate change agreements if developing countries are to participate on a fair basis.
Industrial Ecology Programme, Department of Energy and Process Engineering, Norwegian University of Science and Technology , 7491 Trondheim, Norway.
Daniel B
DB
Müller
Gang
G
Liu
Amund N
AN
Løvik
Roja
R
Modaresi
Stefan
S
Pauliuk
Franciska S
FS
Steinhoff
Helge
H
Brattebø
D000393:Air Pollutants / Q000032:analysis*; D002244:Carbon / Q000032:analysis*; D002245:Carbon Dioxide / Q000032:analysis; D002947:Cities; D003252:Construction Materials; D005160:Facility Design and Construction; D005579:Fossil Fuels / Q000032:analysis; D059066:Gross Domestic Product; D006801:Humans
D000393:Air Pollutants; D005579:Fossil Fuels; D002245:Carbon Dioxide; D002244:Carbon