Evaluation of Environmental Sustainability for Urban Transportation Patterns of Bojnurd by Ecological Footprint Technique

In recent years, sustainable environmental development has become one of the most important topics in various sciences. One of the primary causes of global warming and environmental instability is the excessive production of greenhouse gases. Carbon dioxide has the greatest amount and effect among greenhouse gases. Urban transportation is increasingly emitting carbon dioxide. In recent decades, urban transportation has also been an indispensable part of the city and urban life with the increasing expansion of cities and population growth. In many cities, especially less developed cities, urban transportation as well as traffic have currently become a constant challenge and left many environmental effects. The increasing number of city trips has resulted in air pollution, noise pollution, and weather phenomena. The emission of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, is one of the most important destructive effects of urban transportation, which ultimately causes global warming and climate change. Therefore, if the production of carbon dioxide is more than the city's carrying capacity, it will endanger environmental sustainability in the long term. The ecological footprint index is used as an integrated method to calculate the absorption capacity of the city based on carbon production and to evaluate environmental sustainability in many countries of the world at different levels. The ecological footprint is generally a measure of how much land is needed to absorb the carbon produced by humans. The ecological footprint shows the environmental sustainability or unsustainability of the range determined based on the volume of carbon produced. Therefore, it is necessary to calculate the ecological footprint of activities that pollute the environment. Since the city of Bojnurd has experienced a significant increase in population and sudden expansion in recent years, particularly after becoming the capital of the province and considering the multifold increase of urban trips in this city, the purpose of this research is evaluation of environmental sustainability for urban transportation patterns of Bojnurd by ecological footprint technique.

The present research with the descriptive-analytical method evaluates the environmental sustainability of intra-city transportation in Bojnurd. To this end, the required data, including the number of trips, daily movements, and the average distance traveled per trip for each travel pattern by referring to documents, reports, as well as the relevant organizations, has been collected. Then, the ecological footprint of Bojnurd urban transportation is calculated.

Finally, by comparing the per ecological footprint capita of Bojnurd urban transportation with the world standard, it is found that out of the five modes of transportation, private cars, taxis, buses, minibuses, and motorcycles, only two models of buses and minibuses are environmentally sustainable. The private car is the most unstable model whose per ecological footprint capita is nine times larger than that of the global standard per capita. This research shows that the transportation system of Bojnurd is environmentally unstable because the volume of carbon dioxide produced by this system is much higher than the capacity of absorbing carbon dioxide by the city's lands.

Due to the increasing demand for using private cars and the trend of migration to the city, these problems will increase in the future and the process of bad ecological effects on the city of Bojnurd will accelerate, which requires urgent measures and careful planning.