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

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 CO 2 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.