Carbon Free Boston: Social equity report 2019

OVERVIEW: In January 2019, the Boston Green Ribbon Commission released its Carbon Free Boston: Summary Report, identifying potential options for the City of Boston to meet its goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2050. The report found that reaching carbon neutrality by 2050 requires three mutually-reinforcing strategies in key sectors: 1) deepen energy efficiency while reducing energy demand, 2) electrify activity to the fullest practical extent, and 3) use fuels and electricity that are 100 percent free of greenhouse gases (GHGs). The Summary Report detailed the ways in which these technical strategies will transform Boston’s physical infrastructure, including its buildings, energy supply, transportation, and waste management systems. The Summary Report also highlighted that it is how these strategies are designed and implemented that matter most in ensuring an effective and equitable transition to carbon neutrality. Equity concerns exist for every option the City has to reduce GHG emissions. The services provided by each sector are not experienced equally across Boston’s communities. Low-income families and families of color are more likely to live in residences that are in poor physical condition, leading to high utility bills, unsafe and unhealthy indoor environments, and high GHG emissions.1 Those same families face greater exposure to harmful outdoor air pollution compared to others. The access and reliability of public transportation is disproportionately worse in neighborhoods with large populations of people of color, and large swaths of vulnerable neighborhoods, from East Boston to Mattapan, do not have ready access to the city’s bike network. Income inequality is a growing national issue and is particularly acute in Boston, which consistently ranks among the highest US cities in regards to income disparities. With the release of Imagine Boston 2030, Mayor Walsh committed to make Boston more equitable, affordable, connected, and resilient. The Summary Report outlined the broad strokes of how action to reach carbon neutrality intersects with equity. A just transition to carbon neutrality improves environmental quality for all Bostonians, prioritizes socially vulnerable populations, seeks to redress current and past injustice, and creates economic and social opportunities for all. This Carbon Free Boston: Social Equity Report provides a deeper equity context for Carbon Free Boston as a whole, and for each strategy area, by demonstrating how inequitable and unjust the playing field is for socially vulnerable Bostonians and why equity must be integrated into policy design and implementation. This report summarizes the current landscape of climate action work for each strategy area and evaluates how it currently impacts inequity. Finally, this report provides guidance to the City and partners on how to do better; it lays out the attributes of an equitable approach to carbon neutrality, framed around three guiding principles: 1) plan carefully to avoid unintended consequences, 2) be intentional in design through a clear equity lens, and 3) practice inclusivity from start to finish

Advanced Urban Energy Planning: an interdisciplinary approach to improve heat decarbonization assessments

Urban areas have been recognized as the heart of the decarbonisation process, being potential drivers of sustainable or unsustainable paths. The necessary transition to cleaner and more sustainable cities recently raised the research attention on the possible ways to perform urban energy planning. However, there is still not a wellrecognized procedure and an agreed methodological framework to support urban energy planning, leading to inappropriate strategy definitions, directly focusing on the design of a pre-defined plan. This thesis has the primary objective to contribute in providing a theoretical-methodological framework to support urban energy planning by exploring, applying, adapting and combining with other disciplines, the principal energy system planning methods and tools. A review of scientific literature was performed to identify the state-of-art significant limitations on which the thesis was structured. Without seeking to replace other existing modelling approaches and without presupposing a full knowledge in the different research disciplines, this Ph.D. dissertation provides a basis for understanding how the weaknesses of the different approaches can be rectified by the strengths of others to move beyond traditional urban energy planning applications focused on the built environment. Comprehensive energy system methods and tools are necessary at the planning stage to quantitatively consider interactions among sectors and demand and supply options over long-term horizons. Nevertheless, the thesis confirms that while they are incredibly useful for planning purposes, they cannot be used alone for urban applications and should be combined with other methodologies. This need is mostly related to the necessity of disposing of a detailed and highly disaggregated description of the demand and of the spatiality to deal with specific urban needs (critical areas, liveability, built environment constraints). In particular, spatial analyses are fundamental in urban planning to considerably improve the quality of planning and decision-making processes through intuitive visualization maps. Furthermore, the involvement of stakeholders is key to the success of the planning procedure: they speed the data collection process, support definition of assumptions and a shared city vision (qualitative evaluations). Given the complex nature of urban energy planning, an interdisciplinary and integrated methodological procedure - based on the actions of knowing, understanding and planning – is therefore proposed. The procedure combines building physics, energy planning and territorial analyses to create a preliminary methodological background able to deliver technical, financial and environmental insights for the definition of energy plans. The proposed methodological framework was applied to a case study that fixed the research boundaries to the demand and supply side of the urban built environment of district-heated cities. The case study, on the one hand, provides numerical evidence to results and on the other hand offers a theoretical background for guiding urban planners, researchers, and decision-makers in future urban planning applications. As a result, the proposed integrated and comprehensive framework provides evidence of the multiple benefits of taking into account synergies between demand and supply, particularly in term of avoided additional investments. The scenarios analysis confirms that ambitious environmental targets can be reached at reasonable added costs if investments are appropriately channelled. The suggested research advances in urban energy planning will allow achieving more informed assessments of appropriate strategic investments, their life-cycle costs, and energy/ environment ambitions. All the recommended planning phases are fundamental, and the author suggests to push future research and practices to enhance the procedure by dividing it into a planning stage (knowing & understanding/ planning/ prioritizing & deciding) and into an operational phase (designing/acting/ monitoring & informing), leading to a bi-directional flow of information between planning and operational models