Cities are complex. From downtown and suburban areas to industrial and commercial zones, they consist of diverse neighbourhoods with a wide range of uses and densities. This mix can make it difficult to determine – and measure – which combination of policies, regulations and incentives would make the strongest positive impact on a city’s environmental sustainability.
Addressing this challenge has brought together a cross-disciplinary team at the University of British Columbia (UBC), says Professor Ron Kellett, director and professor, School of Architecture + Landscape Architecture (SALA). “We create methods of modelling and visualizing the outcomes of different policy decisions that focus on using less energy and creating less emissions.”
Professor Adam Rysanek, assistant professor of Environmental Systems at SALA, says that energy demand and emissions intensity are often looked at in tandem, but they are not the same. “In some circumstances, you may have a reduced energy demand, but if the demand isn’t met with a benign fuel source, this doesn’t have the desired impact on emissions,” he says. While mechanisms for promoting energy savings are typically highly transparent, their consequences for emissions are dependent on the type of energy supply.
Rysanek suggests that a way to reduce the carbon footprint of buildings is to encourage building owners or operators to shift to sustainable practices and technologies. “Offering incentives for green buildings on the community scale can be very cost-efficient, but it is also one of the most difficult interventions to monitor,” he explains. “On the other hand, we can target a central authority to influence high-level decisions regarding energy supply.”
Engaging major utilities and enabling them to move to cleaner energy sources may require greater investment, but impacts are more tangible, says Kellett. “We realize that solutions have to be compatible with local issues,” he says, adding that different jurisdictions have different policy tools available to them.
“There are a number of components that can help to achieve a better performance of urban spaces, such as changing the way buildings are heated and cooled and reducing emissions from vehicles—for example, by encouraging the adoption of electric vehicles or making transit systems more efficient,” says Kellett. “All these components have to work together in order to achieve the desired outcomes.”
Rysanek believes models can help to facilitate the discussion of complex issues among multiple stakeholders, including engineers, planners, economists and policy-makers. “Our interdisciplinary models allow stakeholders to share and interact with the data that can inform these decisions,” he says. “We are creating a framework of simulation tools that can be used in many different disciplines.”
Dr. Jon Salter, a researcher within elementslab, SALA’s Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability, believes that global climate models serve to illustrate the big picture while smaller models can home in on solutions, which are often heavily dependent on local parameters. “Our tools give us a way of integrating a range of data and creating spatial representations of solutions,” says Salter. He adds that the standardization and collection of data, as well as better access to such data, are enabling this kind of work.
Kellett hopes that simulations can advance the issue of framing the discussion around the topic of “livability,” he says. “This is an area that remains challenging. We talk about energy and emissions, but [citizens] are interested in how decision-making impacts livability, such as making life easier, healthier, more affordable and more comfortable. As this body of work moves forward, we are aware that we need to translate the topics in a way that engages the public.”
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