Urban and rural carbon footprints in developing countries

Abstract

A good understanding of household carbon emissions is an important part of forming climate mitigation strategies to achieve the goals set out in the Paris Agreement. Numerous studies have been carried out on emissions from household consumption and the inequality between urban and rural areas in high-income developed countries, but there is a lack of in-depth analysis of such differences in developing countries. Our research details household carbon footprints (CFs) of four urban and four rural income categories for 90 developing countries, by linking global expenditure data to the environmentally extended multi-regional input–output approach. We show that there are large inequalities between urban and rural areas in developing countries. The average per capita CF in urban areas tends to be larger than that of rural inhabitants ranging from twice as large to nine times larger. We find that electricity consumption and transport are the largest contributors to the total CF in all expenditure groups. High-income rural households have an average per capita CF of 12.38 t CO₂ which is 25% higher than the equivalent urban high-income group, which deviates from the literature looking at a subset of cases. Our study contributes to the existing research on CFs by providing knowledge on the consumption patterns and related carbon emissions of urban and rural populations in these understudied parts of the world.