Midway evaluation in Environmental studies - Johanna Raudsepp

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Student: Johanna Raudsepp

Thesis title: What moves us: Connections between activity spaces, leisure travel and well-being.

Doctoral committee: Jukka Heinonen, Professor, University of Iceland.
Áróra Árnadóttir, Adjunct, University of Iceland.
Michal Czepkiewicz, Assistant Professor, Poznan University.
Kamyar Hasanzadeh, University Lecturer, University of Helsinki.

Abstract

Cities and travel are one of the largest contributors to CO2 emissions. Common mitigation strategies, like densification, have unintended consumption-related side effects. People continue to travel abroad several times a year for their wellbeing, despite increased awareness of the climate impacts of travel. The doctoral thesis takes a mixed methods approach to exploring this phenomenon through four articles using quantitative data from 2017 and 2022, and interviews. Firstly, interviews with Reykjavik residents indicated that people’s contact with both their immediate and broader urban environment affects their wellbeing and could also drive their leisure travel behaviour. Therefore, in the next step we utilised activity spaces as a novel tool in the Icelandic context to study urban mobility and its connections to travel emissions and well-being. Thus, the relationships between activity space characteristics and travel emissions were explored, which demonstrated an association between urban mobility and domestic leisure travel that is not necessarily driven by one’s neighbourhood. In a further study, we investigate exposure to various land use types during day-to-day mobility in Reykjavik and how that affects well-being and engagement in leisure travel. Lastly, more recent travel footprints in the Nordic countries are examined, where we find that travel footprints exceed recommended limits for 1.5-degree global warming. As key target years for reductions are fast approaching, we highlight the need to reduce travel footprints in the Nordics while meeting the basic needs (social floor) and considering the well-being of people.