Effects of government policy, socioeconomics, and weather on residential GHG emissions across subnational jurisdictions: The case of Canada

Effective greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction policies require integration across both vertical and horizontal political jurisdictions. However, there remains much ambiguity about integrating these strategies across subnational jurisdictions because of knowledge gaps in quantifying the factors affecting emission variation across these jurisdictions. To address this, we modeled the effects of government policy, socioeconomics, and weather on GHG emissions from electricity, natural gas, and petrol for the average household in Canadian city and province jurisdictions, respectively, from 1997 to 2009. The percentage of GHG variation explained by our models ranged from 60.6% to 98.3% for cities and 71.1%–99.3% for provinces. The variation partitioning showed that socioeconomics was the most important variable category, accounting for 15.6%–49.0% of emission variation in cities and 66.6%–75.2% in provinces. Government policy was only significant at the city level, accounting for at most 4.8% of emission variation, but had joint contributions with other variable categories, particularly socioeconomics. Overall, the factors affecting residential GHG emissions changed from the city to provincial jurisdictions and the extent of these changes differed across energy sources. These findings stress the importance of integrating locally based, energy source specific policies into subnational and national based strategies for effective emission reductions.