Household time use, carbon footprints, and urban form : a review of the potential contributions of everyday living to the 1.5 degrees C climate target

The 1.5 °C mitigation challenge for urban areas goes far beyond decarbonizing the cities’ energy supply and needs to enable and incentivize carbon-free everyday living. Reviewing recent literature, we find that dense and mixed urban form enables lower direct emissions from mobility and housing, while income is the major driver of total household carbon footprints; importantly, these effects are not linear. The available urban infrastructure, services and societal arrangements, for example on work, all influence how households use their time, which goods and services they consume in everyday life and their subsequent carbon footprints and potential rebound effects. We conclude that changes in household consumption, time use and urban form are crucial for a 1.5 °C future. We further identify a range of issues for which a time use perspective could open up new avenues for research and policy.Peer reviewe

Green Facades – How they Matter for Working Environments, Public Spaces and the Livability of a City

Sustainable urban development is the focus of many research initiatives, especially due to increasing urbanization and climate change. Buildings and their renovation are central to the European "Green Deal". In the new Austrian climate and energy program, the topic of buildings comes first with a target renovation rate of 3%. Current climate change adaptation strategies call for an increase in greening of existing buildings and on facades. Public spaces are shaped by the surrounding buildings. The facades and roofs of these buildings can have a high potential to mitigate urban heat island effects. Social change and innovation in working cultures result in reshaping working environments and the need for public space. Large-scale glass buildings are widely considered architectural highlights, but pose problematic challenges to urban spaces. Glass has a significant impact on the microclimate inside the building and in the immediate outdoor environment: a concentration of radiant energy and high indoor temperatures put a strain on the energy balance and the well-being of the occupants. The retrofit greening of glass facades is a gap in building expertise and there is a lack of standard applications for the retrofit shading and insulation of glass buildings to obtain associated microclimatic benefits. The project GLASGrün aims to develop, implement, test and monitor modular vertical greening standards for active external shading by deciduous plants on commercial buildings with large glazed facades. Transferable modular-based designs are to be developed. Additionally, sociological surveys on acceptance and perception will be implemented. GLASGrün generates quantitative data on energy, temperature and microclimate balance as well as qualitative data on the perception of the building situation before and after greening interventions and on public awareness. New findings on the acceptance and well-being of employees and customers, on purchasing behavior and market-economic parameters will be available. GLASGrün is developing guidelines for constructive solutions, submission processes and care and maintenance management plans for the systems under consideration and for the vertical green standards tested, which are scalable and transferable and form an economic basis for future adaptations of further buildings as well as for their maintenance. A socio-ecological transformation faces the challenge of how integrated solutions can be developed in dialogue with the users and to what extent these produce the desired effects such as greenhouse gas reduction or better indoor climate. On the other hand, the best solutions in the technical sense can also fail due to social barriers: the acceptance of decision-makers, a lack of willingness to cooperate on the part of employees, or a loss of image in the neighborhood, to name just a few examples. Acceptance depends amongst other factors on both the concrete technical implementation and the process of introduction. Thus, acceptance is not a static variable, but is in a relationship with the technical solution options themselves. Public spaces are key to the discussion on sustainable urban development in their function against urban heat islands. Their diversity of uses and users allows for both a broad discussion and start of discourses and the testing of innovative sustainable measures, in this case greening of facades on buildings perceived in public space. In this paper we will present 2 case studies in Austria with the first results of interviews with employees and users of glass facade buildings and the users of public space

Farmer Cooperation as a Means for Creating Local Food Systems—Potentials and Challenges

Facing the continuous loss of family-run farms across Europe, farmers are seeking new pathways to sustainability. One such pathway is involvement in local food supply systems. Often, this requires new forms of cooperation among farmers and with consumers. Little is known, however, about how this cooperation works in practice and how it might be better fostered. This paper aims to illustrate various forms of cooperation in relation to small-scale farming and the establishment of local food supply. It sheds light on challenges farmers are facing and on the potential measures they can adopt to tackle these challenges. By means of an Austrian case study, researchers applied a participatory method (Social Multi-Criteria Evaluation) and conducted workshops with farmers. Research shows that local production, processing and distribution infrastructure becomes more affordable when farmers collaborate with each other and with consumers and institutions. Furthermore, sharing and collectively developing know-how helps to optimise local farming and food supply systems. However, farmers often lack the knowledge and time to establish new collaborations and to re-organise labour, logistics and communication processes. They would benefit from the availability of cooperative schemes that help facilitate such processes and innovations

Partizipative Modellierung. Beteiligungsexperimente in der sozialökologischen Forschung

Österreichische Zeitschrift f. Soziologie, 2011, 36 (2): 74-97Folgt man aktuellen soziologischen Diagnosen, so lässt sich heute in ver- schiedenen Gesellschaftsbereichen eine Aufwertung des Partizipationsgedankens konstatieren. Im Umweltbereich kommt es dabei, so unsere These, zu einer Experimentalisierung von Partizipa- tion. Das heißt, neben traditionelle und zuweilen protestförmige Teilhabeforderungen ökologisch bewegter BürgerInnen treten neue Beteiligungsformate, die sich oft der Initiative seitens der Wis- senschaft verdanken. Solche Beteiligungsexperimente werden in der sozialökologischen For- schung genutzt, um konkrete Lösungen im Bereich nachhaltiger Entwicklung zu konzipieren und umsetzbar zu machen. Unsere empirische Analyse zeigt, dass die mit Partizipation erwarteten Ra- tionalitätsgewinne am Ehesten in solchen Kontexten zu erwarten sind, in denen Eigeninteresse, lebensweltliche Betroffenheit und ein Spezialwissen der Beteiligten vorausgesetzt werden können

Time-Use Patterns and Sustainable Urban Form: A Case Study to Explore Potential Links

Linking time use of the inhabitants of a city with their energy consumption and urban form is an approach which allows integration of the social dimension into research on sustainable urban development. While much has been written about the planning of cities and its implications for human social life, the question of the relationship between time-use patterns and urban form remains underexplored. This is all the more astonishing as time-use statistics offer a unique tool for analysing socio-economic changes regarding family and household structures, gender relations, working hours, recreational behaviour and consumption patterns. Furthermore, spatial planning plays a significant role in establishing time structures. With this paper we aim to explore the possibility of using the time-use data of an urban population to find links between individual time-use patterns and urban form. We describe a case study in Vienna where we addressed time use and mobility of citizens in a participatory approach to jointly develop an integrated socio-ecological model of urban time-use patterns and energy consumption

Stakeholder-supported Research on the Food-Water-Energy Nexus with three International Case Studies

The projected increasing population in cities and metropolitan regions results in higher demands of resources, i.e., food, water, and energy (FAO 2018), that are essential for human well-being, poverty reduction, and sustainable development(Hülsmann and Ardakanian 2018).There are clear interactions between water, food, and energy that may result in synergies or trade-offs between different sectors or interest groups. To address the issue,the international project IN-SOURCE models and analyses the Food-Water-Energy Nexus (FWE Nexus) in three case study regions of Germany, Austria and the United States of America. Due to the complexity of the nexus issue, stakeholders have been involved actively in the research process, whose valuable output would strongly support the decision-making processes. This paper gives an overview of the methods, case studies, and stakeholder involvement of the whole project. With the novel methods, stakeholder-oriented process, and case studies' representativity, IN-SOURCE serves as a benchmark for future FWE researches

Urban Land Use and Food Supply: the Example of Vienna

Since 2008 more than half of the world's population live in cities and in 2050 it will be more than two thirds. Urbanization increases not only the cities themselves, but also their responsibility to provide a ‘Good Life for All’ within planetary boundaries. Global agreements such as the Paris Climate Agreement, the UN Sustainable Development Goals or the Biodiversity Charter underpin and secure these aspirations. While 55% of the global population live in urban areas, it is estimated that 1-3% of world’s land is urbanized. Hence, cities are characterised by land scarcity and urban land use conflicts crystallize around issues such as food production, housing, recreational areas or transport infrastructure. Nevertheless, soil and its biological productivity through photosynthesis is the prerequisite of every life on this planet and urban land use does not end at the city gates: food is just one example of how the city is connected to its hinterland, nation, and to the rest of the world. Their supply with agricultural products is feeding the city, but also connects it with both social and ecological impacts on people (e.g. farmers) and the environment at the place of production resp. processing. From this point of view, the responsibility of urban areas as consumption ‘hotspots’ does not end at their city borders. Recently, a broader awareness of environmental impacts by consumed goods could be observed. An important contributor here is the communication and visualization of footprints, which are sustainability indicators that quantify resource use or ecological consequences of certain products. Some well-known examples are probably the ecological footprint, which measures the biologically productive area required, resource footprints for water and land or the carbon footprint, which illustrates the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the consumption of a product or lifestyle. Especially in the context of cities, contrasting consumption and production-based accountings has been proved to provide important insights for options to reduce ecological impacts of cities. In the course of the IN-SOURCE project, we quantify urban land use intensities both inside and outside of city borders applying the concept of HANPP (Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production) as a further environmental footprint indicator. HANPP measures the depth of human interventions into the biological productivity of ecosystems. Net primary production (NPP) is the amount of biomass produced by the process of photosynthesis minus the plants' own energetic requirements in an ecosystem. Human appropriation of NPP occurs through two distinct processes: first, land cover/use change (e.g., from forest to cropland, HANPPluc) alters ecological patterns and processes, inclduing NPP, and second, via agricultural and forestry harvest, biomass is removed from ecosystems (HANPPharv). HANPP can be calculated for territorial units, e.g. cities or nations, and it also allows to relate the land use intensity of cities within their borders with impacts beyond. In this contribution, we focus on impacts associated with urban food supply in order to contextualize and explore these impacts within the urban food-water-energy nexus (FWE nexus). In IN-SOURCE, we developed the HANPP Explorer as an interactive web application, which enables stakeholders and other practitioners to access insights from this research and interactively explore the topic. The HANPP Explorer intends to provide knowledge of the manifold dimensions of urban food, thereby gaining new perspectives on urban land use and opening up possible future developments for discussion

Kapitel I: Zusammenfassung Für Entscheidungstragende

Derzeit ist es schwierig, in Österreich klimafreundlich zu leben. In den meisten Lebensbereichen, von Arbeit über Mobilität und Wohnen bis hin zu Ernährung und Freizeitgestaltung, fördern bestehende Strukturen klimaschädigendes Verhalten und erschweren klimafreundliches Leben (hohe Übereinstimmung, starke Literaturbasis). {Kap 3-9} Der vorliegende Bericht bestärkt somit für Österreich die Aussagen des Klimarates der Vereinten Nationen (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC), wonach zur Erreichung der Ziele des Pariser Klimaabkommens grundlegende Transformationen im Sinne umfassender Strukturveränderungen notwendig sind (hohe Übereinstimmung, starke Literaturbasis)