Quantification of urban metabolism through coupling with the life cycle assessment framework: concept development and case study
By B. Goldstein, M. Birkved, M. Quitzau, Michel Hauschild. 2013
189 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Cities now consume resources and produce waste in amounts that are incommensurate with the populations they contain. Quantifying and benchmarking the environmental impacts of cities is essential if urbanization of the world’s growing population is to occur sustainably. Urban metabolism (UM) is a promising assessment form in that it provides the annual sum material and energy inputs, and the resultant emissions of the emergent infrastructural needs of a city’s sociotechnical subsystems. By fusing UM and life cycle assessment (UM–LCA) this study advances the ability to quantify environmental impacts of cities by modeling pressures embedded in the flows upstream (entering) and downstream (leaving) of the actual urban systems studied, and by introducing an advanced suite of indicators. Applied to five global cities, the developed UM–LCA model provided enhanced quantification of mass and energy flows through cities over earlier UM methods. The hybrid model approach also enabled the dominant sources of a city’s different environmental footprints to be identified, making UM–LCA a novel and potentially powerful tool for policy makers in developing and monitoring urban development policies. Combining outputs with socioeconomic data hinted at how these forces influenced the footprints of the case cities, with wealthier ones more associated with personal consumption related impacts and poorer ones more affected by local burdens from archaic infrastructure.
Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d3ad56e87a4cd45e76e423128e9078251bbc489f
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Environmental Engineering
In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
Citations in the corpus
- Urban versus conventional agriculture, taxonomy of resource profiles: a review (2016, methodology): “This raises another benefit of LCA as an UA environmental assessment tool; it is seen as the natural choice by urban researchers to couple with studies of urban metabolism (Chester et al. 2012; Goldstein et al. 2013; Clift et al. 2015).”
- A research challenge vision regarding management of agricultural waste in a circular bio-based economy (2018, background): “Such indirect assessment means are fused metabolic and LCA based approaches as presented for urban areas by Goldstein et al. (2013).”