This paper examines a framework for calculating carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂-e)

Australia's urban built environment contributes significantly to the nation's greenhouse gas emissions; therefore, encouraging urban development to pursue low-carbon outcomes will aid in reducing carbon in the overall economy. Cities and urban areas are configured in precincts, which have been identified as an ideal scale for low-carbon technologies that address energy, water and waste. Even though new governance models and systems are being created to enable low-carbon precincts to operate with a degree of independence within a broader centralised utility structure, greater effort is required to refocus governance on this smaller scale of delivery. Furthermore, at this time, no consistent carbon accounting framework is in place to measure emissions or emission reductions at this scale, thereby limiting the ability to acknowledge or reward progressive, sustainable low-carbon developments. To respond to this situation, a framework is proposed that could form both the basis of a carbon certification scheme for the built environment and provide a platform for generating carbon credits from urban development.

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Global change is required from a strong dependency on high consumption and carbon intensive economies to reduced consumption and low carbon society construction. Cities can offer an enormous contribution to the reduction of carbon emissions; however this process requires a certain degree of rethinking and redesigning of our cities including, infrastructural restructuring with network patterns and resource flows that foster low carbon urban development. Distributed systems that support low carbon urban development including, decentralised power, water, waste and transport are becoming popular as a viable alternative or complimentary addition to centralised city services. However, the emerging decentralised systems pose a unique set of risks and this is generating new modes of governance at national, regional and local. The growing interest in distributed energy systems and the parallel transition that is occurring towards multilevel governance, which can support such schemes, will be examined in this paper. A framework will be used to characterise the different governance structures being used to implement decentralised services; and this study will examine how such approaches promise to facilitate delivery, operation and ownership of distributed city services. An assessment will also be made on a series of economic models and business partnerships that are emerging that offer viable structures to manage distributed energy systems in cooperation with local government utilities, investors and corporate entities. This research will investigate how certain regulatory barriers to centralised energy systems can be overcome to allow for large-scale implementation of distributed energy options. The possible governance strategies will be demonstrated with reference to some international and national case studies including Woking and London in the UK and Sydney in Australia, which best exemplify the distributed energy systems' model and the success factors and barriers for its implementation. Finally, the study will discuss the opportunities, challenges and risks that exist for Australia in adoption of such governance schemes, and it will suggest areas where future governance investigation could enhance sustainable planning and development in Australia.