Untangling Urban Sprawl and Climate Change: A Review of the Literature on Physical Planning and Transportation Drivers

Significant efforts have been dedicated to studying the linkages between urban form, fossil energy consumption, and climate change. The theme of urban sprawl helped to federate a significant portion of such efforts. Yet, the research appears fragmented, at stems from different disciplines and mobilizes different methods to probe different aspects of the issue. This paper seeks to better understand the status of knowledge concerning the linkages between sprawl and climate change through a critical review of the literature published between 1979 and 2018. The exercise entailed revisiting how sprawl has been defined, characterized and measured, and how such parameters have informed the research themes and the approaches mobilized to study its impacts on climate change. For, sprawled environments contribute the climate change directly and indirectly, due to the individual or combined effects of its land use, land cover, urban form, and transportation characteristics. The results indicate that sprawl's impacts have been mainly investigated in three principal streams of research and based on a limited number of factors or combinations of factors. Though a strong consensus emerges on the negative environmental costs of sprawl, including toward climate change, there remain ambiguities when trying to untangle and weigh specific causes.