GREENING THE UK BUILDING STOCK: Historic Trends and Low Carbon Futures 1970-2050

2009 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
A I Brown ◽  
G P Hammond ◽  
C I Jones ◽  
F J Rogers

Historic trends and future projections of energy use and carbon dioxide emissions associated with the United Kingdom building stock are analysed for the period 1970-2050. Energy use in housing is found to rise at a slightly slower rate than the increase in household numbers, which totalled some 25.5 million in 2000. It appears feasible to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the UK domestic building stock by more than 65% by 2050. But this would require a significant take-up of energy saving measures and the adoption of various low or zero carbon (LZC) energy technologies. Non-domestic buildings consisted of some 1.98 million premises in 2000. Anticipated changes in the UK Building Regulations will lead to reductions in energy use and carbon emissions of up to 17% and 12% respectively for 2010 standard buildings. Improvements in the non-domestic building stock and industrial processing could lead to a reduction of nearly 59% in CO2 emissions, via the adoption of LZC energy technologies. Thus, the potential for ‘greening' the UK building stock – making it environmentally benign - is large, but the measures needed to achieve this would present a significant challenge to the UK government, domestic householders, and industry in the broadest sense.

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (7) ◽  
pp. 3660
Author(s):  
Rathna Hor ◽  
Phanna Ly ◽  
Agusta Samodra Putra ◽  
Riaru Ishizaki ◽  
Tofael Ahamed ◽  
...  

Traditional Cambodian food has higher nutrient balances and is environmentally sustainable compared to conventional diets. However, there is a lack of knowledge and evidence on nutrient intake and the environmental greenness of traditional food at different age distributions. The relationship between nutritional intake and environmental impact can be evaluated using carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from agricultural production based on life cycle assessment (LCA). The objective of this study was to estimate the CO2 equivalent (eq) emissions from the traditional Cambodian diet using LCA, starting at each agricultural production phase. A one-year food consumption scenario with the traditional diet was established. Five breakfast (BF1–5) and seven lunch and dinner (LD1–7) food sets were consumed at the same rate and compared using LCA. The results showed that BF1 and LD2 had the lowest and highest emissions (0.3 Mt CO2 eq/yr and 1.2 Mt CO2 eq/yr, respectively). The food calories, minerals, and vitamins met the recommended dietary allowance. The country’s existing food production system generates CO2 emissions of 9.7 Mt CO2 eq/yr, with the proposed system reducing these by 28.9% to 6.9 Mt CO2 eq/yr. The change in each food item could decrease emissions depending on the type and quantity of the food set, especially meat and milk consumption.


2008 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 7373-7389 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Stohl

Abstract. Most atmospheric scientists agree that greenhouse gas emissions have already caused significant changes to the global climate system and that these changes will accelerate in the near future. At the same time, atmospheric scientists who – like other scientists – rely on international collaboration and information exchange travel a lot and, thereby, cause substantial emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2). In this paper, the CO2 emissions of the employees working at an atmospheric research institute (the Norwegian Institute for Air Research, NILU) caused by all types of business travel (conference visits, workshops, field campaigns, instrument maintainance, etc.) were calculated for the years 2005–2007. It is estimated that more than 90% of the emissions were caused by air travel, 3% by ground travel and 5% by hotel usage. The travel-related annual emissions were between 1.9 and 2.4 t CO2 per employee or between 3.9 and 5.5 t CO2 per scientist. For comparison, the total annual per capita CO2 emissions are 4.5 t worldwide, 1.2 t for India, 3.8 t for China, 5.9 t for Sweden and 19.1 t for Norway. The travel-related CO2 emissions of a NILU scientist, occurring in 24 days of a year on average, exceed the global average annual per capita emission. Norway's per-capita CO2 emissions are among the highest in the world, mostly because of the emissions from the oil industry. If the emissions per NILU scientist derived in this paper are taken as representative for the average Norwegian researcher, travel by Norwegian scientists would nevertheless account for a substantial 0.2% of Norway's total CO2 emissions. Since most of the travel-related emissions are due to air travel, water vapor emissions, ozone production and contrail formation further increase the relative importance of NILU's travel in terms of radiative forcing.


2009 ◽  
Vol 2009 ◽  
pp. 249-249
Author(s):  
H Prosser

The work of the UK Climate Change Commission (UKCCC) in recommending targets and options for reducing emissions of greenhouse gases is focusing attention on what agriculture and land use can contribute to deliver these targets. Although overall the major issue is the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions from energy use, agriculture and land use are significant emitters of methane and nitrous oxide. UKCCC has identified three main routes by which emissions can be reduced• Lifestyle change with less reliance on carbon intensive produce -eg switching from sheep, and beef to pig, poultry and vegetables.• Changing farm practices – eg to improve use of fertilisers and manures• Using new technology on farms – eg modifying rumen processes, anaerobic digestion.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikkel Bennedsen

Abstract Following the Paris Agreement of 2015, most countries have agreed to reduce their carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions according to individually set Nationally Determined Contributions. However, national CO2 emissions are reported by individual countries and cannot be directly measured or verified by third parties. Inherent weaknesses in the reporting methodology may misrepresent, typically an under-reporting of, the total national emissions. This paper applies the theory of sequential testing to design a statistical monitoring procedure that can be used to detect systematic under-reportings of CO2 emissions. Using simulations, we investigate how the proposed sequential testing procedure can be expected to work in practice. We find that, if emissions are reported faithfully, the test is correctly sized, while, if emissions are under-reported, detection time can be sufficiently fast to help inform the 5 yearly global "stocktake" of the Paris Agreement. We recommend the monitoring procedure be applied going forward as part of a larger portfolio of methods designed to verify future global CO2 emissions.


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (14) ◽  
pp. 8501-8510 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bo Zheng ◽  
Frédéric Chevallier ◽  
Philippe Ciais ◽  
Grégoire Broquet ◽  
Yilong Wang ◽  
...  

Abstract. In order to track progress towards the global climate targets, the parties that signed the Paris Climate Agreement will regularly report their anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions based on energy statistics and CO2 emission factors. Independent evaluation of this self-reporting system is a fast-growing research topic. Here, we study the value of satellite observations of the column CO2 concentrations to estimate CO2 anthropogenic emissions with 5 years of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) retrievals over and around China. With the detailed information of emission source locations and the local wind, we successfully observe CO2 plumes from 46 cities and industrial regions over China and quantify their CO2 emissions from the OCO-2 observations, which add up to a total of 1.3 Gt CO2 yr−1 that accounts for approximately 13 % of mainland China's annual emissions. The number of cities whose emissions are constrained by OCO-2 here is 3 to 10 times larger than in previous studies that only focused on large cities and power plants in different locations around the world. Our satellite-based emission estimates are broadly consistent with the independent values from China's detailed emission inventory MEIC but are more different from those of two widely used global gridded emission datasets (i.e., EDGAR and ODIAC), especially for the emission estimates for the individual cities. These results demonstrate some skill in the satellite-based emission quantification for isolated source clusters with the OCO-2, despite the sparse sampling of this instrument not designed for this purpose. This skill can be improved by future satellite missions that will have a denser spatial sampling of surface emitting areas, which will come soon in the early 2020s.


2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-170
Author(s):  
Alejandro Dellachiesa ◽  
Tunhsiang Edward Yu

Using a heterogeneous panel cointegration analysis, this study examines the long-run impacts of income, trade, and energy use on carbon dioxide emissions (CO2), in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay between 1970 − 2008. Results show that the long-run impact of those factors on CO2 emissions; particularly trade, changed following the establishment of the Mercosur regional free trade agreement in 1991. The results also suggest that increasing the level of openness, after removing barriers to trade and encouraging investments in transportation infrastructure, created positive effects in the reduction of CO2 emissions post-Mercosur. Our findings indicate that the enhancement and increase in utilization of the region’s inland waterway system could shift the Mercosur’s transport matrix towards more economical transportation modes that generates positive effects on the environment.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Yu-Jing Chiu ◽  
Yi-Chung Hu ◽  
Peng Jiang ◽  
Jingci Xie ◽  
Yen-Wei Ken

The forecast of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions has played a significant role in drawing up energy development policies for individual countries. Since data about CO2 emissions are often limited and do not conform to the usual statistical assumptions, this study attempts to develop a novel multivariate grey prediction model (MGPM) for CO2 emissions. Compared with other MGPMs, the proposed model has several distinctive features. First, both feature selection and residual modification are considered to improve prediction accuracy. For the former, grey relational analysis is used to filter out the irrelevant features that have weaker relevance with CO2 emissions. For the latter, predicted values obtained from the proposed MGPM are further adjusted by establishing a neural-network-based residual model. Prediction accuracies of the proposed MGPM were verified using real CO2 emission cases. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed MGPM performed well compared with other MGPMs considered.


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 23 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Vourdoubas

Use of fossil fuels in modern societies results in CO2 emissions which, together with other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, increase environmental degradation and climate changes. Carbon dioxide emissions in a society are strongly related with energy consumption and economic growth, being influenced also from energy intensity, population growth, crude oil and CO2 prices as well as the composition of energy mix and the percentage of renewable energies in it.The last years in Greece, the severe economic crisis has affected all sectors of the economy, has reduced the available income of the citizens and has changed the consumers’ behavior including the consumption of energy in all the activities. Analysis of the available data in the region of Crete over the period 2007-2013 has shown a significant decrease of energy consumption and CO2 emissions due to energy use by 25.90% compared with the reduction of national G.D.P. per capita over the same period by 25.45% indicating the coupling of those emissions with the negative growth of the economy. Carbon dioxide emissions per capita in Crete in 2013 are estimated at 4.96 tons. Main contributors of those emissions in the same year were electricity generation from fuel and heating oil by 64.85%, heating sector by 3.23% and transportation by 31.92%.


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