Jukka Heinonen

University of Iceland | HI · Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Decarbonisation of stationary energy supply, particularly electricity grids, is the current focus of climate change mitigation policy. However, studies have suggested that this narrow policy focus is insufficient to achieve meaningful global emissions reductions. Using Iceland as a case study, this paper demonstrates that significant emissions aris...

Life-cycle assessment (LCA) is an established methodology that can provide decision-makers with comprehensive data on the environmental impacts of products and processes during the entire life cycle. However, the literature on building LCAs consists of highly varying results between the studies, even when the assessed buildings are very similar. Th...

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...

Non-technical summaryGrowth in resource consumption and associated environmental degradation threatens food systems, with millions of people living in hunger globally, demonstrating the need for greater socio-ecological efficiency in food provisioning. This paper considers how sustainable consumption can ensure that human needs with regards to food...

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...

With the urgent global need to limit warming to 2 • C as well as a localized need in our case study to address rising energy demand amid electrical and thermal network limitations, a critical examination of demand-side energy reductions and the concept of energy sufficiency is needed. This paper contributes to the sparse literature on bottom-up ana...

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...

With a rapidly decreasing carbon budget, the urgency of deep GHG reductions becomes increasingly necessary. This accentuates the need for the emerging paradigm shift, transforming the built environment from a major source of CO2 emissions to a carbon sink. Biogenic carbon sequestration and storage (CSS) has the potential to play pivotal role as it...

Many people want to play their part to tackle climate change, but often do not know where to start. Carbon Footprint (CF) Calculators pose potential for helping individuals situate themselves in climate impacting systems of which they are a part. However, little is currently known about whether and how individuals who complete CF calculators unders...

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...

Reducing the ecological intensity of provisioning systems (food, mobility, etc.) has been suggested as necessary for achieving a good life for all within the planetary boundaries. Few studies have considered the socio-ecological efficiency of such systems, however. This study therefore developed a sector-specific conceptualization of ground passeng...

Understanding the relationship between energy use and well-being is crucial for designing holistic energy policy. The latter has to both effectively mitigate climate change driven by current fossil-based energy systems as well as promote human development, which requires energy. While a significant body of research investigates this relationship, s...

The need to reconfigure provisioning systems to achieve a good life within the planetary boundaries has been recognized, but few studies have investigated the temporal change dynamics of such systems in the context of strong sustainability. Using Iceland's mobility sector as a case study, the effects of significant economic swings and other landsca...

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...

The quantification of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is increasingly important in spatial planning for regions, cities, and areas. The combination of territorial and consumption-based accounting (CBA) approaches can currently be considered best practice for calculating GHG emissions at sub-national levels, in terms of informing local decision-makin...

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...

Current national greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions accounts and mitigation targets are mostly based on territorial GHG accounting. While several analyses present future trajectories describing how nations could achieve emissions targets, there are relatively few analyses from the consumption-based perspective. Simultaneously, there is a broad literatu...

Hydrogen can play a key role in decarbonizing industrial and transportation processes. As the European demand for hydrogen rises, several EU member states have been looking into ways to import remotely-produced hydrogen (H2) to fulfill their local needs. This cradle-to-gate LCA study assesses the H2 production in Iceland using local renewable energ...

With the concurrent challenges of looming ecological crisis and growing global social inequity, the need to assess the socio-ecological efficiency of provisioning systems to assess progress towards a ‘safe and just space’ has been highlighted in the literature. Mobility systems represent good examples of provisioning systems required to gain access...

Electrification is considered key to decarbonizing the transport sector. While electric vehicles (EVs) lack tailpipe emissions, battery and electricity production can lead to significant emissions. This study analysed whether EVs can effectively mitigate GHG emissions in North America, by calculating two GHG breakeven indicators for EVs and compari...

Policymakers and global energy models are increasingly looking towards hydrogen as an enabling energy carrier to decarbonize hard-to-abate sectors (projecting growth in hydrogen consumption in the magnitude of hundreds of megatons). Combining scenarios from global energy models and life cycle impacts of different hydrogen production technologies, t...

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...

Identifying the energy needs of citizens and taking into account different lifestyles and patterns of consumption is a first step for a global transformation towards renewable, fair and democratic energy systems. Currently, Total Primary Energy Supply (TPES) is the most widely used metric of energy consumption, which only includes the energy consum...

Cities are hotspots of anthropogenic activity and consumption. Thus, the consumption-based carbon footprints of their residents are pronounced. However, the beneficial climate impacts attributable to individual residents, such as carbon sequestration and storage (CSS) provided by residential green spaces and housing, have received less attention in...

The spatial consumption-based assessment tradition is already 30 years old. However, while all the well over 100 studies in this field over the past 30 years have been published under the same consumption-based carbon footprint label, the studies actually fall into two main categories, which have substantial differences between them, by definition...

Policymakers and global energy models are increasingly looking towards hydrogen as an enabling energy carrier to decarbonize hard-to-abate sectors (projecting growth in hydrogen consumption in the magnitude of hundreds of megatons). Combining scenarios from global energy models and life cycle impacts of different hydrogen production technologies, t...

The climate crisis, the renewed importance of energy security and geopolitics, and economic interests are fuelling interest in the hydrogen economy. While still in its nascency, if financial and political commitments are an indication, the hydrogen economy is likely to rapidly develop. Many scholars have noted, however, the significant lack of soci...

Non-technical summary The exponential growth of humanity's resource consumption over the last half-century has led to ecological decline while people's basic needs have not been universally satisfied. The ‘doughnut economy’ and sustainable consumption corridor concepts have gained global attention, providing frameworks in which the maximum allowab...

The buildings’ life cycle assessment is missing consensus on the methods for revealing the environmental benefits in the case of components that are designed for disassembly. To clarify conflicting guidelines, this study provides a new improved method and investigates its applicability by comparing it to two approaches suggested in previous literat...

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...

This article presents findings from a mixed-methods study on residential location and travel in the Reykjavik capital region, Iceland, drawing on a combination of a tailor-made questionnaire survey and in-depth qualitative interviews, including cross-sectional and before–after analyses. A residential location close to the main city center of Reykja...

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...

This thematic issue focuses on important but understudied connections between cities and climate impacts of long-distance travel. While urbanization and urban density have climate change mitigation potential in short-distance travel (e.g., by reducing car use and supporting public transportation, walking, and cycling), they have been associated wit...

The carbon budget for limiting global warming to the targeted 1.5 ° is running out. Cities have a central role in climate change mitigation, as the vast majority of all greenhouse gas emissions occur to satisfy the energy and material needs of cities and their residents. However, cities typically only account for their direct local emissions from t...

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

The construction and use of buildings consume a significant proportion of global energy and natural resources. Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) is arguably the most international green building certification system and attempts to take actions to limit energy use of buildings and construct them sustainably. While there has been...

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...

Of the UN SDGs, the role of infrastructure in enabling or compromising the development of future low-carbon settlements falls under the goal #11 “Sustainable cities and communities”. However, when it comes to the specific content of the SDG #11, only the subgoals 11.6 and 11.B-C loosely include these development-phase emissions. If it was shown tha...

Human economic activities and following carbon emissions have been recognized to be a real threat to the environment. The current levels of consumption-based carbon footprints in all developed economies grossly exceed the sustainable level. Scientists have concluded that in addition to technological solutions, downscaling of consumption and far-rea...

Transportation plays a defining role in daily life, and this transport activity acts as a major source of global (GHG) emissions. Cities are macro-level actors that can measure and govern the transportation sector and associated GHG emissions with their boundaries. This study thus performed a scenario analysis using the Rey-kjavik capital area as a...

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...

Inner cities have been recently linked to a higher volume of long-distance travel for leisure purposes of their residents when compared to suburban and rural areas. The compensation hypothesis proposes that this difference results from urban residents' tendency to travel away to compensate for poor access to green spaces or to escape urban stressor...

Purpose Over the last eight years, the Middle East has experienced a series of high profile conflicts which have resulted in over 5.6 million Syrians forced to migrate to neighbouring countries within the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region or to Europe. That have exerted huge pressure on hosting countries trying to accommodate refugees in d...

This study presents a comparison of the life cycle carbon emission (LCCO2) and embodied energy calculation between two kinds of bricks, sun-dried and fired clay, as means of evaluating the energy and climate impact of each brick type and the economics of production. Focus is paid to the differences across the whole production chain between sun-drie...

Executive summary The development and operation of the built environment could play a key role in the mitigation efforts. However, the transition towards more sustainable settlements requires massive use of materials and energy in new energy efficient buildings, and supporting infrastructures. Traditionally the embodied emissions from materials hav...

The European Union (EU) has made climate change mitigation a high priority though a policy framework called “Clean Energy for all Europeans “. The concept of primary energy for energy resources plays a critical role in how different energy technologies appear in the context of this policy. This study shows how the calculation methodologies of prima...

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...

Consumption-based carbon footprint (CBCF) assessments have become increasingly important in studying the drivers of climate change from a consumer perspective. A wide range of studies and approaches for CBCF have been presented, yet a systematic and interpretative synopsis of the literature is missing. We present a comprehensive review of more than...

We noticed that the Figures 2 and 3 have become the same in the final version of this paper [...]

Some cities have set carbon neutrality targets prior to national or state-wide neutrality targets, which makes the shift to carbon neutrality more difficult, as the surrounding system does not support this. The purpose of this paper was to evaluate different options for a progressive city to reach carbon neutrality in energy prior to the surroundin...

This study examined domestic and international long-distance travel patterns of Reykjavik residents. We applied a mixed-methods approach with data triangulation to three datasets, two quantitative and one qualitative. Quantitative analyses included bivariate statistics, spatial statistics, and regression, and qualitative analysis included an explan...

Since the UNCED‘s call for the creation of sustainability indicators many such have been put forth in the literature. One of the more successful ones, in terms of popularity, is the Ecological Footprint (EF). Much criticism has been directed at the EF, not least the carbon uptake component (CF). The CF typically makes up around 50% of global EF and...

This study applies life cycle assessment (LCA) to examine environmental impacts of generating 1 kW h of energy in a geothermal combined heat and power (CHP) plant based on high temperature geothermal utilization. The Hellisheidi geothermal CHP plant located in SW Iceland, producing 303 MWe and 133–267 MWth in a double flash cycle, is used as a case...

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...

Urbanisation increases household carbon footprints in developing economies. However, the results from developed countries have varied, particularly in Europe. This study provides a coherent comparison of the impact of the degree of urbanisation on income, expenditure and carbon footprints in Europe. On average, carbon footprints are 7% lower in cit...

Waste heat utilization is shown to have the potential to decrease greenhouse gas emissions globally. The purpose of this case study is to illustrate how the utilization of waste heat to decrease municipal boundary greenhouse gas emissions may increase such emissions within wider boundaries. The case study assesses the utilization of waste heat gene...

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...