Carbon Emissions, Transport and Location: a Sustainability Toolkit for Stakeholders in Development

his paper reports a tool that ranks work place destinations in accordance with their sustainability based on their location’s capacity to minimise transport-generated carbon emissions within the Greater Dublin Area (GDA). To measure the transport-related CO2 emissions the following datasets were used: (i) Central Statistics Office (CSO) 2006 Place of Work Census of Anonymised Records (POWCAR) and (ii) CO2 emissions per mode of transport. These datasets were combined in a model with a 250 metre grid square coding of the GDA. The model calculations produced a carbon emissions value for every person travelling to work in each of the work destination grid squares within the GDA. The spatial data analysis was performed with a Geographical Information Systems (GIS) software package - ArcGIS - which conveyed both a visual and numerical representation of the model’s resulting calculations. The results reveal a link between the location of workplace destination and the carbon emissions generated per person to travel to that location. It is shown that those destinations within close proximity to public transport options in city centre locations demonstrate a lower CO2 emissions reading than those in more out-of-town locations without the range of public transport options. This outcome of the model forms the basis of a tool that could potentially assist in the environmental component of decision making for the location of work place developments. The implication of the tool is that it can allocate a ranking to locations based on their sustainability from a transport perspective.