Carbon Emissions of Infrastructure Development

2022

Spatial patterns of settlements and transport infrastructures are known to influence per-capita energy use and CO2 emissions at the urban level1–4. At the national level, other potential determinants of energy use and CO2 emissions, primarily GDP, received much attention5–7, whereas the role of settlements and infrastructure patterns was disregarded due to lacking data. We present a set of novel national-level indicators derived from global satellite- and crowd-sourced maps to characterize extent and spatial patterns of settlements and infrastructures. We quantify these indicators for 113 countries and statistically analyze the results along with final energy use and territorial CO2 emissions, as well as factors usually considered in IPAT (impact = population x affluence x technology) approaches. We find that our indicators have similar explanatory power for energy use and CO2 emissions as GDP and IPAT factors. Covariates include built-up area, urban population density, the spatial ...

Nature Climate Change, 2014

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions to avert potentially disastrous global climate change requires substantial redevelopment of infrastructure systems 1-4. Cities are recognized as key actors for leading such climate change mitigation e orts 6-10. We have studied the greenhouse gas inventories and underlying characteristics of 22 global cities. These cities di er in terms of their climates, income, levels of industrial activity, urban form and existing carbon intensity of electricity supply. Here we show how these di erences in city characteristics lead to wide variations in the type of strategies that can be used for reducing emissions. Cities experiencing greater than ∼1,500 heating degree days (below an 18 • C base), for example, will review building construction and retrofitting for cold climates. Electrification of infrastructure technologies is e ective for cities where the carbon intensity of the grid is lower than

Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability

Even though sub-Saharan Africa has contributed little to historic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the continent is at the forefront of global climate change impacts and decarbonization imperatives. Such dynamics prompt the need to question where the financing for rapid construction and transformation of urban infrastructure systems that respond to emerging efficient, low carbon and long-standing developmental objectives should come from. This paper examines the potential role of carbon financing in the form of the Clean Development Mechanism and the growing critiques from across the continent and beyond in relation to this financing pathway. It argues that carbon market-based responses to mitigation generate a series of problems, flawed logics and failures in the capacity of towns and cities to address low carbon, urban futures and should be replaced through a shift to financing based on climate debt reparations.

In the context of climate change response, sustainable urban infrastructure needs to deliver deep cuts in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, of the order of 80-90% by 2050. This paper examines how various GHG reduction strategies applied to urban infrastructure open up or foreclose the potential for deeper cuts in the long-term. It uses case studies of a major precinct-scale urban redevelopment site and a city-wide planning process in Sydney to illustrate how developers and planners are balancing short to medium-term GHG reduction actions with the need to achieve much deeper cuts in the long-term. There is a particular focus on the implications of strategies that prioritise gas-fired cogeneration. The paper argues that too little attention is being given to the long-term implications of short-term GHG reduction strategies and proposes infrastructure design principles for long-term GHG reduction.

The development of sustainable infrastructure is a key-factor for addressing the challenges of finite resource availability, ecological deterioration and climate alteration. The global environmental system can no longer support carbon-intensive infrastructure with the energy consumption and carbon emissions they trigger. Therefore, sustainable infrastructure development is demanding a different approach that safeguards the environment and its finite resources within the context of an ethically, culturally and socially valuable development process. This study investigated the challenges and opportunities that lie at the nexus of climate change and infrastructure development. A sectoral analysis of the infrastructure sector was undertaken to understand this in the context of developing economies. The sectoral analysis method studies the size, demographic, pricing, competitive and other economic dimensions of a sector. Using secondary data sourced from various global reports, the study revealed that half of global GHG emissions were associated with the infrastructure sector. This may appear negative, but the developmental opportunities for mitigation and adaptation were found to be positive. Maximizing economic, social and environmental value in infrastructure development must guide investments. The study also identified the significance of prioritizing mitigation and adaptation-related infrastructure investment needs and the balancing of such needs with economic growth priorities for developing economies. The study concluded that there is need to implement cost-effective measures to climate-proof future baseline infrastructure, with the implication to effect changes to construction codes and climate-risk assessments at planning stage.

Urbanization is a demographic, economic, and land transformation process. Building construction and operation are integral aspects of urban land use change and contribute to material and energy resources consumption and the resulting carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions in urban areas. In this paper, we ask two questions regarding the urbanization process: 1) Do the land, material, and energy use efficiencies associated with the construction and operation of buildings increase over time? 2) Do the gains in resource use efficiencies offset the increases in resource demands due to the magnitude of urbanization? To answer these questions, we use a systematic approach similar to a material flow analysis and apply it to the Pearl River Delta, a rapidly urbanizing region in China. We use a combination of satellite data and official statistics to evaluate changes in urban population density and building density from 1988 to 2008. Both density measures decrease from 1988 to 2003; after 2003, building density increases while population density continues to decline. We also track the indirect impacts of urban land expansion on material and energy demands and associated CO 2 emissions using concrete and heating/cooling as proxies for building construction and operation, respectively. Throughout the study period, structural changes and efficiency gains decrease the demand per unit floor area for both building materials and energy. However, the efficiency gains are outstripped by the magnitude of urban expansion, therefore leading to an increase in the demand for resources and CO 2 emissions per capita. Our results show that focusing only on gains in efficiency for individual buildings without considering the scale of urban expansion results in underestimate of the cumulative energy, material, and greenhouse gas emissions impacts of urbanization. We emphasize the distinction between the rates versus the accumulations of these impacts over spatial and temporal scales. We discuss the relevance of the Environmental Kuznets approaches to tackling environmental impacts that are cumulative in nature and may lead to irreversible changes in the environment. We conclude that tracking the energy, materials, and emissions impacts of urbanization requires a multi-scale approach that ranges from the individual building to the urban region.

Journal of Comparative Asian Development, 2015

This paper proffers an extension of an institutional framework for guiding low-carbon urban infrastructure investment. It reads the “low-carbon societies” discourse as an expression of Ecological Modernization Theory (EMT), and assesses it using Daerah Khusus Ibukota (DKI) Jakarta as a case study, along with a complementary survey of macro analyses of the effectiveness of ecological modernization strategies. The paper finds that DKI Jakarta, as expected of the low-carbon societies discourse emergent from EMT, has a well-developed plan and institutional framework for pursuing improvements in the intensity of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. However, despite ensuing mitigation targets and organizational changes, projections of overall carbon emissions for DKI Jakarta by 2030 are likely to exceed levels deemed to be sustainable and equitable. In response this paper suggests that the institutional framework for guiding low-carbon urban infrastructure investment must complement its prioritization of efficiency strategies with an engagement with the idea of sufficiency and its eventual enactment. This is a challenging proposal given the dominance of industrial capitalism and the related trend that David Harvey termed “entrepreneurialism” in urban governance. This realization calls for theoretical and practical innovations in climate governance. An economic development framework responding to these demands is discussed and suggestions for an institutional framework to guide low-carbon urban infra- structure investment are considered.

ii This publication is supported by COST ESF provides the COST Office support through an EC contract COST is supported by the EU RTD framework programme COST -European Cooperation in Science and Technology is an intergovernmental framework aimed at facilitating the collaboration and networking of scientists and researchers at European level. It was established in 1971 by 19 member countries and currently includes 35 member countries across Europe, and Israel as a cooperating state. COST funds pan-European, bottomup networks of scientists and researchers across all science and technology fields. These networks, called 'COST Actions', promote international coordination of nationally-funded research. By fostering the networking of researchers at an international level, COST enables break-through scientific developments leading to new concepts and products, thereby contributing to strengthening Europe's research and innovation capacities. COST's mission focuses in particular on: x Building capacity by connecting high quality scientific communities throughout Europe and worldwide; x Providing networking opportunities for early career investigators; x Increasing the impact of research on policy makers, regulatory bodies and national decision makers as well as the private sector.

Environmental Science & Technology, 2009

Resource productivity, measured as GDP output per resource input, is a widespread sustainability indicator combining economic and environmental information. Resource productivity is ubiquitous, from the IPAT identity to the analysis of dematerialization trends and policy goals. High resource productivity is interpreted as the sign of a resource-efficient, and hence more sustainable, economy. Its inverse, resource intensity (resource per GDP) has the reverse behavior, with higher values indicating environmentally inefficient economies. In this study, we investigate the global systematic relationship between material, energy and carbon productivities, and economic activity. We demonstrate that different types of materials and energy exhibit fundamentally different behaviors, depending on their international income elasticities of consumption. Biomass is completely inelastic, whereas fossil fuels tend to scale proportionally with income. Total materials or energy, as aggregates, have intermediate behavior, depending on the share of fossil fuels and other elastic resources. We show that a small inelastic share is sufficient for the total resource productivity to be significantly correlated with income. Our analysis calls into question the interpretation of resource productivity as a sustainability indicator. We conclude with suggestions for potential alternatives.

iScience, 2021

Major infrastructure financiers will have to significantly decarbonize their investments to meet mounting promises to cut carbon emissions to ''net-zero'' by midcentury. We provide new details about those needed shifts. Using two World Bank databases of infrastructure projects throughout the developing world, and applying a methodology for imputing the projects' likely future carbon output, we assess the emissions profile of power-plant projects executed from 2018 through 2020-the three years immediately preceding the spate of netzero pledges. We find that approximately half the generation executed in those years is too carbon-intensive to align with keeping Earth's average temperature from exceeding 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels, largely because of the prevalence of new natural-gas-fired power plants. We also find new evidence of host countries' agency in shaping carbon trajectories: Much of the climate-misaligned financing is not foreign but domestic. And we find different institutions are financing infrastructure portfolios with significantly differing carbon intensities.