Kagawa

Three hours after John Riley and Bev Lowe left the home they had lived in for more than four decades, the house was gone — as was every other one on Kagawa Street, once a tidy lane of spacious homes but now a place where only memories remain.

"For example, it's easy to calculate how much CO2 a single automobile will potentially produce. It's another thing entirely to try and find the totality of emissions a car produces from assembly line to scrap yard. You need to consider the emission that come from the supply chain and manufacturing the raw materials," explains Professor Shigemi Kagawa from Kyushu University's Faculty of Economics, whose team has been studying supply chain emissions.

To this end, Kagawa and his team began looking into the combined carbon emissions that come from building a standard wooden house in Japan -- which account for approximately 90% of the country's total housing stock -- and which industrial sectors contribute to it the most.

While this is a move in the right direction, Professor Shigemi Kagawa from Kyushu University's Faculty of Economics reports in his new paper, published in the Journal of Cleaner Production, that banning new gas vehicles may not be enough to reach Japan's decarbonization goals.

"Our team focused on how much CO2 is produced during a car's entire lifetime, from the first resource extracted from the earth to when it gets destroyed. Looking at the lifecycle CO2, or LC-CO2, of a car allow us to take a larger view on a car's emissions," explains Kagawa.