Current World Environment

Estimating the Ecological Footprint of Transportation in the City of Isphahan (Iran)

Kamran Shayesteh¹ ^* , Kobra Melhosseini Darani¹ and Alireza Ildoromi²

¹ Department of Environmental Sciences, Malayer University, Malayer, Iran

² Department of Rangelands and Watershed Management, Malayer University, Malayer, Iran

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12944/CWE.9.3.24

Abstract

Different methods aimed to quantify the effects of human activities on the natural environment have been developed. One of them is ecological footprint that is the total area of land, to produce all the resources a population consumes and to absorb all of the wastes it generates. An important impact of human activities on the environment is climate change that relates to the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The most important gas is CO₂ which is released to atmosphere as a result of burning fossil fuels in daily life of human activities. A main part of increasing CO₂ in urban atmosphere is road transportation; so estimation of ecological footprint of it can describe the situation of consuming fossil fuels in a city. To do so, the amount of different fuels consumed in a period of time, the area under transportation constructions and also the energy consumed in the process of network construction and annual road maintenance should be regarded. In this study the ecological footprint of transportation activities in the city of Isphahan in central Iran was estimated at 0.4 global hectares. It means that for each Isphahan resident, 0.4 global hectares area is needed to sequester the CO₂ released to atmosphere from different transportation activities.

Keywords

Ecological Footprint; Transportation; Global Hectare; Isphahan

Copy the following to cite this article:

Shayesteh K, Darani K. M, Ildoromi A. Estimating the Ecological Footprint of Transportation in the City of Isphahan (Iran) . Curr World Environ 2014;9 (3) DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.12944/CWE.9.3.24

Copy the following to cite this URL:

Shayesteh K, Darani K. M, Ildoromi A. Estimating the Ecological Footprint of Transportation in the City of Isphahan (Iran). Curr World Environ 2014;9(3). Available from: http://www.cwejournal.org/?p=7441

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