Today@Dal

Posted Monday, April 29 to CBC.ca:

A Halifax researcher is busting a myth that people who live in city centres have smaller ecological footprints than those who live outside of the downtown core.

Jeff Wilson, who recently graduated from a Dalhousie PhD program researching ecological economics, said he has discovered that people who live in the downtown area of Halifax do not necessarily have smaller carbon footprints than others in the Halifax region.

Wilson said emissions are roughly the same for people who live in the suburbs and downtown. He said that’s due, in part, to the fuels used in Nova Scotia.

“Home heating and our electricity has a high carbon intensity,” he said. “So if you're in another jurisdiction, for example Quebec where they use hydro and natural gas, it would be much lower. What we’re seeing is that the shelter dominates the overall greenhouse gas emissions — it’s about 78 per cent — whereas that spread between shelter and transportation would be different in a different jurisdiction.”

Wilson finds that 78 per cent of carbon emissions in the Halifax region are related to homes — three times the amount from vehicles.

He also said part of the reason for the higher that expected carbon footprint in the core is that Halifax is not as dense as other cities, where assumptions about people living outside if the downtown core tend to have higher carbon footprints may hold true.

Read the rest of this article and listen to the audio interview at CBC.ca.