Abstract:

Reducing CO₂ emissions from transport is a major issue worldwide. It is also an important goal for sustainable urban and transport development. Using bibliometric methods, this article reviews and summarizes the current research situation and trends of global CO₂ emissions from transport over the past two decades. On this basis, the article reviews and analyzes the literature on the driving forces of energy consumption and its related CO₂ emissions, and the impacts of urban form and neighborhood built environments on CO₂ emissions from transport at the national, city, and neighborhood scales, respectively. Our study found that most of the early national-scale studies were based on time-series data, using decomposition methods to explore the main driving forces of transport energy consumption. In recent years, further studies calculated CO₂ emissions from transport with a "top-down" approach based on energy consumption data, and explored the impact of socioeconomic, urban form, and transportation development factors on CO₂ emissions from transport by constructing panel data models. Early city-scale studies focused on whether compact cities are a low-carbon urban form, mainly using cross-sectional data and correlation analysis methods. In recent years, scenario forecasting, GIS spatial analysis, spatial regression, spatial simulation, and other methods have been further developed to explore the spatial differences of urban transport carbon emissions and their relationships with urban morphology and urban center distribution. For the neighborhood-scale studies, mathematical models were used to examine the effects of residents’ demographics and built environments on CO₂ emissions, mainly based on cross-sectional and disaggregated questionnaire survey data. The built environment factors include population density, land-use mix, distance to employment sites or distance to urban centers, road network and intersection density, and the supply level of public transport. At the end of the article, research trends of influencing factors of CO₂ emissions from transport in urban China are analyzed with respect to the three aspects of study data, methodology, and research contents.

Key words: transport, travel, CO₂ emissions, influencing factors, multi-scale analysis