A method to estimate the spatial distribution of transport carbon emissions in Shanghai

According to the fourth assessment report of IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), global warming owns more than 90% to human activities. And quantification of human-induced CO₂ emission at fine space and time resolution has a critical need in carbon cycle and climate change research. Carbon emission from urban traffic caused by burning fossil fuels is a key source in the process of urbanization during the past 10 years. Therefore, exploring the spatial distribution of urban transport carbon emission at finer space-time resolution will benefit a lot for regional carbon cycle and carbon mitigation. In this paper, based on real-time data collected by Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), we contrived a relatively simple, inexpensive and accurate method through traffic flow theory and traffic emission model to estimate regional spatial distribution transport carbon emission. The experiment result in Shanghai indicated that the method is applicable between accuracy and cost.