Evaluating the Transition Towards Post-Carbon Cities: A Literature Review

Abstract

To achieve the new European targets concerning CO2 emission reduction, the concept of a post-carbon city has been promoted, which is focused on low-energy and low-emission buildings provided with intelligent heating and cooling systems, electric and hybrid cars, and better public transport. This paradigm entails the inclusion of aspects not strictly related to energy exploitation but referring to environmental, social, and economic domains, such as improvement in local energy security, people’s opinion on different energy solutions, economic co-benefits for private users, environmental externalities, and so on. In this domain, it is of particular importance to provide the decision makers with evaluation tools able to consider the complexity of the impacts, thus leading to the choice of the most sustainable solutions. The paper aims to investigate the scientific literature in the context of evaluation frameworks for supporting decision problems related to the energy transition. The review is carried out through the scientific database SCOPUS. The analysis allows for systematizing the contributions according to the main families of evaluation methodologies, discussing to what extent they can be useful in real-world applications. The paper also proposes emerging trends and innovative research lines in the domain of energy planning and urban management. While the energy transition is an important trend, the analysis showed that few studies were conducted on the evaluation of projects, plans, and policies that aim to reach post-carbon targets. The scales of application refer mainly to global or national levels, while few studies have been developed at the district level. Life cycle thinking techniques, such as life cycle assessment and cost-benefit analysis, were widely used in this research field.

The effect of sustainable mobility transition policies on cumulative urban transport emissions and energy demand

“…Notably for urban analysis, a 2010 study analysed potential policy packages in London 43 and more recently, CURTAIL was built as a transport modelling framework to analyse mitigation efforts for cities using Singapore as a case-study 44 . Nevertheless, there exists a lack of studies conducted at a local sub-national (e.g., city) level where policy suggestions become most relevant 45 and this is especially true for assessments of sufficiency and energy demand reductions. This study aims to fill this gap by exploring a single regional sub-sector in high detail and comparing results to a wide range of carbon budgets.…”

Life-Cycle Assessment of a Rural Terraced House: A Struggle with Sustainability of Building Renovations

“…Future research should focus on providing more detailed LCA case studies that would allow the creation of databases similar to energy performance certificate databases available in some countries and regions referenced in [18]. This would allow the creation of guidelines and recommendations that are more accurate than those currently available as deliverables of projects such as ALDREN or Annex 56 [12,13].…”

“…The development of sustainable buildings goes in hand with the development of suitable assessment methods: multi-criteria certification schemes such as LEED or BREEAM [16,17], Energies 2021, 14, 2472 2 of 18 cost-benefit or life-cycle cost assessments [18], energy certificates [19,20], carbon balance [21,22] or other environmental impact assessments [23], etc. A lot of these methods promote a life-cycle approach to buildings based on the life-cycle assessment (LCA).…”

Measuring the low-carbon energy transition in Chinese cities

“…More and more studies focused on the cities’ energy transitions recently. 10 , 11 For example, Hoppe and van Bueren 12 highlighted the importance and challenges of managing climate change and energy transition in cities from a throughout review of seven articles. They also discussed the possible solutions to achieve energy transitions in cities.…”