Integrated urban scenarios of emissions, land use efficiency and benchmarking for climate neutrality and sustainability

Date

2023-12-15

Author

Kılkış, Şiir

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Urban areas represent key opportunities for mitigation efforts through supporting renewable energy systems, improving urban planning, and increasing resource efficiency. This research work develops two types of urban emissions scenarios in green growth-oriented contexts with and without local ambitions. These scenarios are further coupled with improvements in existing land use efficiencies and multi-dimensional analyses. The method is applied to 45 urban areas, including 15 cities that are selected as Mission Cities in Europe. Different urban emissions scenarios indicate possibilities for reducing 135.80 ± 0.87 MtCO2eq of annual urban consumption-based emissions in 2020 by 58.72 MtCO2eq in 2030 along a 100% renewable energy pathway. Urban land use efficiency scenarios are used to determine annual carbon dioxide sequestration penalties that range between 8.25 and 14.95 MtCO2 in 2050 due to more built-up area in local biomes. Monte Carlo simulations support the analyses of urban emissions and sequestration penalties on a cumulative basis. Among illustrative scenario combinations, net cumulative urban emissions are 1725.93 MtCO2eq in the most favourable scenario that is 50.6% lower than those in the least favourable scenario. Multi-dimensional analyses based on a city index for benchmarking indicate an average improvement of 11.500 for Mission Cities with the quickest response for mitigation. The results have implications for guiding bold policy action and integrated urban planning to increase mitigation efforts for climate neutrality and sustainability.

Subject Keywords

Benchmarking, Climate scenarios, Cumulative emissions, Land use efficiency, Urban emissions

URI

https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?partnerID=HzOxMe3b&scp=85169836360&origin=inward
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/106246

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Article