The socio-demographic dimensions of the private transportation emissions

It is known that the transportation sector accounts for a considerable share of the emissions and the primary energy consumption of the countries as a whole, thus determining an increasing attention towards the decarbonisation pathways of the transportation sectors. The energy consumption at the country-scale can be interpreted as the integral of the socio-demographic layer and the behavior spectrum. Thus, ad-hoc policy schemes need to rely on multi-scale approaches, describing the household-scale and, subsequently, scaling-up towards the country-scale. In this long-term aim and perspective, the present communication contributes to the existing discussion regarding relationships between the household/socio-demographic characteristics and the transportation patterns.

In particular, focusing on the Italian case study, this communication explores the relationships between the household/socio-demographic variables and the carbon dioxide emissions related to the private transportation sector. To this end, this paper build on micro-data obtained by the Italian Institute of statistics and it applies a four-step statistical method to select suitable variables, explore the significant determinants and perform an household segmentation. It is found that the geographic area (in terms of the macro-scale as well as the micro-scale geographic locations) as well as income-related variables are likely to be factors influencing the carbon dioxide emissions related to the private transportation sector. [Publisher's text].