Perspectives on subnational carbon and climate footprints: A case study of Southampton, UK

Sub-national governments are increasingly interested in local-level climate change management. Carbon- (CO2 and CH4) and climate-footprints—(Kyoto Basket GHGs) (effectively single impact category LCA metrics, for global warming potential) provide an opportunity to develop models to facilitate effective mitigation. Three approaches are available for the footprinting of sub-national communities. Territorial-based approaches, which focus on production emissions within the geo-political boundaries, are useful for highlighting local emission sources but do not reflect the transboundary nature of sub-national community infrastructures. Transboundary approaches, which extend territorial footprints through the inclusion of key cross boundary flows of materials and energy, are more representative of community structures and processes but there are concerns regarding comparability between studies. The third option, consumption-based, considers global GHG emissions that result from final consumption (households, governments, and investment). Using a case study of Southampton, UK, this chapter develops the data and methods required for a sub-national territorial, transboundary, and consumption-based carbon and climate footprints. The results and implication of each footprinting perspective are discussed in the context of emerging international standards. The study clearly shows that the carbon footprint (CO2 and CH4 only) offers a low-cost, low-data, universal metric of anthropogenic GHG emission and subsequent management

Evaluation of Environmental Accounting Methodologies for the assessment of global environmental impacts of traded goods and services.

Environmental accounting methods (EAM) are currently getting a strong interest from political entities, multinational corporations and citizens. EAMs are applied to a large range of socio-techno-economic activities for monitoring and managing their environmental performance over time: at macro-level to implement the environmental pillar of sustainable development, at meso-level for companies reporting and at micro-level for comparing the environmental footprints of products. IMEA project (IMports Environmental Accounting) is a SKEP-Era-net project (Scientific Knowledge for Environmental Protection) aiming at assessing the potential of EAMs to consider the challenges from globalization and environmental impacts linked to international trade. It was lead by MINES ParisTech/ARMINES with partners from the Institute of Social Ecology, Vienna, TNO, University of Oulu, and VITO, carried out between June 2008 and September 2009. The global aim of IMEA is to provide elements to answer the following question: "Does a given EAM meet societal expectations and how does it cope with new challenges from globalization?". IMEA has focused on the analysis of these challenges based on what EAMs "are", "how" they function and the use of their results in decision-making by the means of an archetypical workflow and an analytical framework. Based on this comprehensive analytical framework, the following EAMs. have been assessed in detail: Life Cycle Assessment, Economy-Wide Material Flow Analysis, Physical Input Output Tables, Environmentally Extended Input-Output Analysis, land use indicators like the Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production, the Actual Land Demand or the Ecological Footprint, and the Water Footprint

A systematic review of empirical methods for modelling sectoral carbon emissions in China

© 2019 Elsevier Ltd A number of empirical methods have been developed to study China's sectoral carbon emissions (CSCE). Measuring these emissions is important for climate change mitigation. While several articles have reviewed specific methods, few attempts conduct a systematic analysis of all the major research methods. In total 807 papers were published on CSCE research between 1997 and 2017. The primary source of literature for this analysis was taken from the Web of Science database. Based on a bibliometric analysis using knowledge mapping with the software CiteSpace, the review identified five common families of methods: 1) environmentally-extended input-output analysis (EE-IOA), 2) index decomposition analysis (IDA), 3) econometrics, 4) carbon emission control efficiency evaluation and 5) simulation. The research revealed the main trends in each family of methods and has visualized this research into ten research clusters. In addition, the paper provides a direct comparison of all methods. The research results can help scholars quickly identify and compare different methods for addressing specific research questions

Scaling the nexus: towards integrated frameworks for analysing water, energy and food

The emergence of the water-energy-food (WEF) nexus concept following the 2011 Bonn Nexus Conference has resulted in a change to the way we perceive our natural resources. Global pressures such as climate change, and population growth have highlighted the fragility of our WEF systems, necessitating integrated solutions across multiple scales and levels. Whilst a number of frameworks and analytical tools have been developed since 2011, a comprehensive WEF nexus tool remains elusive, hindered in part by our limited data and understanding of the interdependencies and connections across the WEF systems. To achieve this, the community of academics, practitioners and policy-makers invested in WEF nexus research are addressing several critical areas that currently remain as barriers. Firstly, the plurality of scales (e.g., spatial, temporal, institutional, jurisdictional) necessitates a more comprehensive effort to assess interdependencies between water, energy and food, from household to institutional and national levels. Secondly, and closely related to scale, a lack of available data often hinders our ability to quantify physical stocks and flows of resources. In this paper, we elucidate many of the challenges that have arisen across nexus research, including the impact of multiple scales in operation across the nexus, and concomitantly, what impact these scales have on data accessibility. We review some of the critical frameworks and tools that are applied by nexus researchers and discuss some of the steps required to develop from nexus thinking to an operationalizable concept, with a consistent focus on scale and data availability

Holistic biomimicry: a biologically inspired approach to environmentally benign engineering

Humanity's activities increasingly threaten Earth's richness of life, of which mankind is a part. As part of the response, the environmentally conscious attempt to engineer products, processes and systems that interact harmoniously with the living world. Current environmental design guidance draws upon a wealth of experiences with the products of engineering that damaged humanity's environment. Efforts to create such guidelines inductively attempt to tease right action from examination of past mistakes. Unfortunately, avoidance of past errors cannot guarantee environmentally sustainable designs in the future. One needs to examine and understand an example of an environmentally sustainable, complex, multi-scale system to engineer designs with similar characteristics. This dissertation benchmarks and evaluates the efficacy of guidance from one such environmentally sustainable system resting at humanity's doorstep - the biosphere. Taking a holistic view of biomimicry, emulation of and inspiration by life, this work extracts overarching principles of life from academic life science literature using a sociological technique known as constant comparative method. It translates these principles into bio-inspired sustainable engineering guidelines. During this process, it identifies physically rooted measures and metrics that link guidelines to engineering applications. Qualitative validation for principles and guidelines takes the form of review by biology experts and comparison with existing environmentally benign design and manufacturing guidelines. Three select bio-inspired guidelines at three different organizational scales of engineering interest are quantitatively validated. Physical experiments with self-cleaning surfaces quantify the potential environmental benefits generated by applying the first, sub-product scale guideline. An interpretation of a metabolically rooted guideline applied at the product / organism organizational scale is shown to correlate with existing environmental metrics and predict a sustainability threshold. Finally, design of a carpet recycling network illustrates the quantitative environmental benefits one reaps by applying the third, multi-facility scale bio-inspired sustainability guideline. Taken as a whole, this work contributes (1) a set of biologically inspired sustainability principles for engineering, (2) a translation of these principles into measures applicable to design, (3) examples demonstrating a new, holistic form of biomimicry and (4) a deductive, novel approach to environmentally benign engineering. Life, the collection of processes that tamed and maintained themselves on planet Earth's once hostile surface, long ago confronted and solved the fundamental problems facing all organisms. Through this work, it is hoped that humanity has taken one small step toward self-mastery, thus drawing closer to a solution to the latest problem facing all organisms.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Bert Bras; Committee Member: David Rosen; Committee Member: Dayna Baumeister; Committee Member: Janet Allen; Committee Member: Jeannette Yen; Committee Member: Matthew Realf

Developing an integrated framework to quantify sustainability indicators in the context of urban systems

Urban systems can be considered living organisms driven by flows of matter and energy (biophysical approach). In addition, the fact of concentrating many people in a small space also implies socioeconomic aspects of coexistence. Currently 60% of the world's population is concentrated in cities. This makes cities great consumers of natural resources, generating a large amount of greenhouse gas emissions, as well as waste. Therefore, this thesis aims to apply and to develop methodologies to determine and quantify the degree of sustainability that Spanish cities have and thus identify their weaknesses. Therefore, this thesis is intended to serve as support for political leaders when making decisions and to create lines of action to improve and achieve the goal of a sustainable city

Petrochemicals and Climate Change : Tracing Globally Growing Emissions and Key Blind Spots in a Fossil-Based Industry

With the risk of climate breakdown becoming ever more pressing as the world is on track for 2.7 degrees warming, pressure is increasing on all sectors of the economy to break with fossil fuel dependence and reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In this context, the chemical industry and the production of important basic chemicals is a key sector to consider. Although historically a driver of economic development, the sector is highly dependent on fossil resources for use as both feedstock and fuel in the production of as well organic as inorganic chemicals. The chemical industry demands both petroleum fractions and natural gas. Petroleum fractions such as naphtha and petroleum gases are used as feedstocks for building block chemicals and polymers (e.g., benzene and polyethylene), while natural gas is used for methanol and ammonia. Indeed, the sector is associated with both large process emissions as well as energy related emissions. Our results demonstrate that in 2020 direct GHG emissions from the petrochemical sector amounted to 1.8 Gt CO2eq which is equivalent to 4% of global GHG emissions. Indirect GHG emissions resulting from the activities in other industries supplying inputs for the petrochemical industry accounted for another 3.8 Gt CO2eq. The petrochemical industry is thus associated with a total of 5.6Gt CO2eq of GHG emissions, equivalent to ~10% of global emissions. Over the past 25 years, emissions associated with petrochemicals have doubled and the sector is the third most GHG emitting industry. This increase is fueled by large growth of petrochemicals production as well as growth in regions with high indirect emissions, i.e., in energy systems with high dependence on coal and other fossil fuels. Over the past decades, the industry has grown rapidly in the Asia-Pacific region especially in China which in 2020 was the source for about 47% of global GHG emissions associated with petrochemicals. USA accounts for 6% of the emissions from the industry and Europe for 5%. The BRIC group of countries, which except for China also includes Brazil, India, and Russia, currently accounts for 57% of GHG emissions from petrochemicals, showing that the emissions from this sector are more geographically clustered in these countries than emissions from other sectors.Proper disaggregated and comparative analyses of key products is currently not possible. Data confidentiality and a high reliance on proxy data limit the reliability of LCA and stands in the way of mapping climate impacts. A strong demand of chemicals life cycle inventory (LCI) data for environmental footprinting has resulted in a general increase of chemicals data in many LCI databases, but the energy demands both for heat and electricity are typically not well-documented for production processes outside the main bulk chemicals. If incinerated at end-of-life plastics and other chemical products will emit embodied carbon as CO2 and if landfilled there is a risk of slow degradation with associated methane emissions. Global estimates based on most LCA datasets will thus significantly underestimate emissions from the chemical industry.The multitude of value chains dependent on the petrochemical industry makes it an important contribution to life cycle emissions in many sectors of the economy. Petrochemicals are used as an intermediate input in many industries and the emissions associated with them thus propagate through the economy, with final demand in manufacturing industries and services being associated with the largest shares of emissions from chemicals. The impacts and emissions downstream in value chains is however poorly understood and disclosure by petrochemical producers is lacking and insufficient. While disclosure of emissions in the industry has increased over the past decades, it remains partial and shows inconsistencies over time. This is due to issues such as different reporting standards, large discrepancies in the extent of disclosure as well as various other gaps and inconsistencies in reporting. This holds for all scopes, although Scope 1 emissions are better covered. Only some firms disclose information about downstream Scope 3 emissions including end-of-life for final products. Emission targets set by firms in the industry do not correspond to the challenge of large and rapid emission reductions. Many targets include only parts of operations and transparent, standardized target-setting is lacking. Reported emission reduction initiatives to achieve targets are far from sufficient focusing mainly on efficiency improvements or insubstantial parts of the operation. Shifting to renewable energy is a key for rapid emission reductions in the industry, yet few firms report strategic targets for this shift. As the industry has historically been closely linked to and integrated with the energy sector it holds a great potential for engaging with the deployment and adoption of renewable energy, although this implies a transformation of the knowledge base and resource allocation in the industry which is still focused on fossil fuels. Roadmaps and scenario analyses show that apart from a shift to renewable energy, a transformation of the industry relies on the deployment of key technologies which are not yet fully developed. This includes new technologies for hydrogen production, e.g., electrolytic (green) hydrogen or hydrogen produced with carbon capture and storage (CCS). New chemical synthesis pathways based on captured carbon, so called carbon capture and utilization (CCU) is also highlighted, but the massive demand for renewable energy associated with this pathway is a significant barrier to its adoption in the near term. The report shows how efficiency improvements continues to be the main focus for reducing the climate impact of petrochemicals, but that this is a completely inadequate approach for achieving the emissions reductions necessary in the coming decades. Breakthrough technologies are unlikely to be deployed at a rate consistent with international climate targets, and there is a great risk in relying on the promises of technologies which are yet to be proven at scale. The large knowledge gaps that remain are key barriers for effective governance of the transition