Case studies on COVID-19 and environment

Coronavirus drastically changes people’s travel behavior all over the world. This study aims to investigate the effect of people’s adaptive travel behavior on greenhouse gas (GHG) emission in south Asian countries. We estimate the changes in GHG emission due to the COVID-19 global restrictions during the period of March–May 2020. An online questionnaire survey was conducted to explore the travel distance, the number of trips, and travel modes in pre-pandemic and during the pandemic in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The travel distances were converted to GHG emission using IPCC and UNEPA emission factors for different modes of travel. COVID-19 suddenly declined the choice of public transport, taxi, and office transport by 55.80 percent, 33.33 percent, and 55.81 percent,…