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Better integration of climate action and sustainable development can help enhance the ambition of the next nationally determined contributions, as well as implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Governments should use this year as an opportunity to emphasize the links between climate and sustainable development.
Agriculture is a major sector responsible for greenhouse gas emissions. Local food production can contribute to reducing transport-related emissions. Since most of the worldwide population lives in cities, locally producing food implies practicing agriculture in urban and peri-urban areas. Exemplary, we analyze the potential to produce fresh vegetables within Berlin, Germany. We investigate the spatial extent of five different urban spaces for soil-based agriculture or gardening, i.e., non-built residential areas, allotment gardens, rooftops, supermarket parking lots, and cemeteries. We also quantify inputs required for such food production in terms of water, human resources, and investment. Our findings highlight that up to 82% of Berlin’s vegetable demand could be produced within the city, based on a reasonable validation of existing areas. Meeting this potential requires 42 km2 of urban spaces for cultivation, a considerable amount of irrigation water, around 17 thousand gardeners, and over 750 million EUR of initial investments. The final vegetable cost would be around 2 EUR to 10 EUR per kg without any profit margin. We conclude that it is realistic to produce a significant amount of Berlin's vegetable demand within the city, even if it comes with great challenges.
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected human mobility via lockdowns, social distancing rules, home quarantines, and the full or partial suspension of transportation. Evidence-based policy recommendations are urgently needed to ensure that transport systems have resilience to future pandemic outbreaks, particularly within Global South megacities where demand for public transport is high and reduced access can exacerbate socio-economic inequalities. This study focuses on Metro Manila - a characteristic megacity that experienced one of the most stringent lockdowns worldwide. It analyzes aggregated cell phone and GPS data from Google and Apple that provide a comprehensive representation of mobility behavior before and during the lockdown. While significant decreases are observed for all transport modes, public transport experienced the largest drop (-74.5 %, on average). The study demonstrates that: (i) those most reliant on public transport were disproportionately affected by lockdowns; (ii) public transport was unable to fulfil its role as public service; and, (iii) this drove a paradigm shift towards active mobility. Moving forwards, in the short-term policymakers must promote active mobility and prioritize public transport to reduce unequal access to transport. Longer-term, policymakers must leverage the increased active transport to encourage modal shift via infrastructure investment, and better utilize big data to support decision-making.
Reliably reducing the emissions in the building sector plays a crucial role if the 1.5°C climate target from the Paris Agreement is to be met. The observed trends show a significant increase in building energy use, especially in emerging economies. Counteracting these trends is absolutely essential, especially in the light of urbanisation, population growth and changing lifestyles. In terms of mitigating the climate impact of buildings, ensuring high levels of efficiency (i.e. very low energy needs, especially for heating and cooling) has the greatest potential for saving energy and emissions, and is at the same time the prerequisite for effective use of energy from renewable sources. Clearly defined targets and suitable metrics are essential to enable appropriate design decisions. Implemented projects clearly indicate that quality assured design and construction lead to reliable in-use energy performance. Effective policy packages to address opportunities and challenges are important drivers to support the uptake of state-of-the-art efficiency measures in the urban building sector.
Global climate
(2008)
This paper reports on a nationwide field survey of managing energy efficiency of buildings under energy performance contracting (EPC) in Chinese building sector. The survey aims at getting insight of Chinese experiences of EPC and survey yielded information on profile, specificity and risk specifications of EPC in Chinese building sector. The key findings are that the existing EPC projects are mainly driven by policies and majority of first parties in EPC are owners of public buildings. The contract specificity is worryingly low, with underspecification prominent in the contract sections of renewal and change of the planned solutions, dispute resolution and compensation for personal and property damage. Insufficient risk specification was a major cause of contract failure and disputing. High risks are observed in not enough feasibility study, delay in completion, operational risks, delay in payment and uninsured loss. Most post EPC projects would be worryingly unsuccessful, given to the facts that many of them have not established their energy team, have no further investment and have no effective maintenance. The Chinese existing emission trading scheme (ETS) offers a vital opportunity for upscaling EPC in building sector and policy framing is needed for linking EPC projects and ETS.
This paper outlines the key elements of a low-carbon stabilization pathway for land transport, focusing on the potential of key policy measures at the local and national level, opportunities for synergies of sustainable development and climate change objectives, and governance and institutional issues affecting the implementation of measures. It combines several approaches to provide an integrated view on the decarbonization of the transport sector based on recent literature. It will assess the quantitative basis potential climate change mitigation pathways and will then look into policy and institutional aspects that relate to the feasibility of these pathways. This combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis to measure the potential, options, and feasibility of climate change mitigation strategies in the transport sector aims to synthesize recent papers on the subject and draw conclusions for future research.
Optimization and simulation models are fit to work on a multitude of technical, economic, and techno-economic questions. However, they are by now not able to satisfactorily include societal aspects like acceptance, spatial implications and legal frameworks. In order to advance scope and explanatory power of simulation models, collaboration in interdisciplinary research teams is needed. Yet the exchange in such teams and its coordination can prove challenging. Furthermore, disciplinary approaches and methods for simulation and optimization might not be familiar to all participants.
To this end, a new conceptual model is introduced. The conceptual model employs few basic elements and concepts for describing and explaining arbitrary societal and technical relationships. Most notably, the conceptual model is general in its design, so contributions to the problem formulation and design components can be made by all team members regardless of their discipline. The procedure is based on common agent-based concepts without using their terminology. Consequently, an exchange among all team members becomes possible without them necessarily being proficient in agent-based modeling. A reduced presentation of workshop results exemplifies the use of novel elements for deriving an emergent agent-based simulation.
Considering the role of transport for a 1.5 Degree stabilization pathway and the importance of light-duty vehicle fuel efficiency within that, it is important to understand the key elements of a policy package to shape the energy efficiency of the vehicle fleet. This paper presents an analysis focusing on three types of policy measures: (1) CO2 emission standards for new vehicles, (2) vehicle taxation directly and indirectly based on CO2 emission levels, and (3) fuel taxation. The paper compares the policies in the G20 economies and estimates the financial impact of those policies using the example of a Ford Focus vehicle model. This analysis is a contribution to the assessment of the role of the transport sector in global decarbonisation efforts. The findings of this paper show that only an integrated approach of regulatory and fiscal policy measures can yield substantial efficiency gains in the vehicle fleet and can curb vehicle kilometres travelled by individual motorised transport. Using the illustrative example of one vehicle model, the case study analysis shows that isolated measures, e.g. fuel efficiency regulation without corresponding fuel and vehicle taxes only have minor CO2 emission reduction effects and that policy measures need to be combined in order to achieve substantial emission reduction gains over time. The analysis shows that the highest level of impact is achieved by a combination regulatory and fiscal policies rather than only one policy even if this policy is more aggressive. When estimating the quantitative effect of fuel efficiency standards, vehicle and fuel tax, the analysis shows that substantial gains with regard to CO2 emission are only achieved at a financial impact level above 500 Euros over a four year period.