Áróra Árnadóttir

• Adjunct at University of Iceland

Concerned by the increasing environmental impact of urban areas and the mobility sector, the study examines mobility in Reykjavík, Iceland. Reykjavík residents have been found to have high emissions in both local and leisure travel. The study aims to explore the connections between urban mobility and leisure travel behaviour using a novel method –...

While the greenhouse gas emissions of most sectors are declining in the EU, transport emissions are increasing. Passenger cars compose a large share of the transport sector emissions, and a lot of effort has been made to reduce them. Despite the significantly improved environmental performance of passenger cars, there is a prevailing belief that th...

Urban areas have a significant impact on climate change, with transport and mobility as one major source. Furthermore, the impact of urban areas on transport extends beyond their own geographic areas, via leisure travel. Research has suggested several mechanisms through which urban areas drive leisure travel, such as social norms, compensation for...

This study provides analyses of carbon footprint survey data from about 7500 respondents in the Nordics to present an overview of Nordic personal travel footprints. The study considers the spatial distribution of travel footprints, the influence of climate concern, and how the footprints fit within the 1.5-degree compatible threshold for 2030. Spat...

Lifestyle changes are recognized as an important part of climate change mitigation. The influence of climate concern on taking individual actions for climate mitigation is well studied; however, the impact that climate concern has on consumption-based carbon footprints (CBCFs) is less studied. We aim to address this gap by examining the relationshi...

The global carbon budget to keep warming within 1.5° is being rapidly depleted, and demand-side measures are crucial to meet mitigation targets. Although the Nordic countries are regarded as having strong environmental policies, per capita consumption-based carbon footprints are high. The effect of climate concern and other pro-environmental attitu...

Changes in personal consumption play an important role in the reduction of greenhouse gases (GHGs) to stay within the 1.5-degree warming carbon footprint budget. Affluent countries have high carbon footprints from a consumptive perspective and therefore have a high potential to reduce emissions from personal consumption. To study this potential, we...

Addressing the growing issue of climate change demands active measures. With its significant carbon footprint, the building industry needs to make immediate efforts contributing to achieving the Paris Agreement's objective of restricting global warming to 1.5°C. This review focuses on Net Zero Emission Buildings (NZEBs) which are claimed to offer a...

The income elasticity of carbon footprint is a summary variable often used to describe the relationship between income and carbon footprints. Previous studies primarily calculate this elasticity using emissions intensities per monetary unit. We surveyed the Nordic countries, allowing us to directly calculate carbon footprints from responses about q...

Reversing the growth pattern in passenger aviation emissions is necessary for climate change mitigation. However, climate-related concerns and norms do not correlate strongly with practices. This study provides an example of a rapid process of social institutionalisation of long-distance travel, which has become a default tool for meeting social ex...

The built environment sector causes significant climate change impacts, which indicates an opportunity for the sector to be of great importance in reducing its global impact. The main strategy has focused on urban density and transport as well as studying the emissions caused by buildings with life-cycle assessments (LCAs). However, a holistic appr...

Consumption-based carbon footprints have been widely used to examine how different demand-side solutions can reduce the emissions from personal consumption. This study not only utilized consumption-based carbon footprints to examine how people living in affluent nations like the Nordic countries can live 1.5 degree warming compatible lifestyles, bu...

Alternative building materials have the potential to reduce environmental pressure from buildings, though the use of these materials should be guided by an understanding of the embodied environmental impacts. Extensive research on embodied greenhouse gas emissions from buildings has been conducted, but other impacts are less frequently reported. Fu...

There is an urgent need to reduce emissions from the aviation sector. Although awareness of climate change is growing, few are willing to alter their flight behaviour. Through a qualitative analysis of interview materials collected from Reykjavik Capital Region residents, this study explores how globally affluent, highly mobile young urbanites just...

A compact urban form has shown many benefits in efficiency. Yet multiple studies have found that residents of urban, dense, and centrally located areas travel more frequently than those living in suburbs, small towns, or the countryside. As air travel is already causing more emissions than ground transport in many affluent urban locations and is pr...

The authors would like to make the following corrections about the published paper [...]

This paper presents a mixed-method analysis of car ownership in Reykjavik, Iceland, a location with a high motorization level and deeply rooted car culture. We utilize qualitative interviews to understand vehicle possession reasons and elaborate the study with statistical analysis using a softGIS survey dataset with characteristics of the responden...

Electric vehicles (EVs) are often considered a potential solution to mitigate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions originating from personal transport vehicles, but this has also been questioned due to their high production emissions. In this study, we performed an extensive literature review of existing EV life-cycle assessments (LCAs) and a meta-analys...

Decarbonization of passenger transport is one of the key means to reduce global GHG emissions and stabilize the climate to an acceptable warming level. The emissions from the road transport sector relate to travel behaviors and the technologies, which are driven by policies, incentives and disincentives, and transport networks. Moreover, the overal...

Transport is a key sector in reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. A consensus prevails on a causal relationship between distance to the city center and emissions from private transport, which has led to an emphasis on density in urban planning. However, several studies have reported a reverse association between the level of urbanity and emissi...

Without rapid and radical greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation, irreversible damage threatening life on the globe might occur already during the next decades. One of the key sectors in finding solutions to climate change is the built environment, which currently directly or indirectly causes the majority of anthropogenic GHG emissions. The transition to...

A lot of emphasis has been put on the densification of urban form to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from transportation. However, many recent studies have found that central urban dwellers, even though their carbon footprints of daily transportation may be lower, might be responsible for higher total emissions than those that reside in suburban ar...