The impacts of people’s behavioral patterns and built environment features on daily carbon footprints

Abstract

Green and compact built environmental features are believed to be sustainable urban environmental designs that can facilitate low-carbon behaviors by reshaping people’s daily behaviors. Previous studies in this field tend to use spatially aggregated data or ignore people’s daily mobility, which might generate misleading empirical findings. Therefore, this study seeks to go beyond previous studies by using individual-level data to examine the associations between individuals’ daily carbon footprints with their daily behavioral patterns and built environmental features around their residential areas and daily activity locations. Specifically, using individual-level data collected by portable real-time sensors, an activity-travel diary, and a questionnaire from four communities in Hong Kong, we found that the daily travel radius of gyration and the out-of-home time ratio were strongly negatively associated with daily carbon footprints. Additionally, built environment features, particularly the density of open space and recreational land, woodland, shrubland, and commercial land, were directly and indirectly associated with carbon footprints. These associations varied across different communities and different measurements of built environment features. These findings have significant implications for sustainable built environmental design and low-carbon society transition strategies. They also highlight the significance of using individual-level data to examine the impacts of people’s behavioral patterns and built environment features on daily carbon footprints, thus providing a broader perspective for future research in this field.