Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
imply a dramatic increase in CO
2eq
concentration to as much as 731 ppm in the
year 2130 leading to a 3.7 C global warming above pre-industrial temperatures
(Valero et al.
2011
). Even if all the greenhouse gas emissions suddenly ceased, the
amount already in the atmosphere would remain there for the next 100 years
(Clayton
2001
). Meaning the rise in the sea level, ocean acidification and the
occurrence of extreme atmospheric events will continue. Hansen et al. (
2013
) are
even more pessimistic believing that the climate has already been changed in an
irreversible manner. A worrying sign that justifies Hansen's view comes from a
recent study (McMillan et al.
2014
) based on the measurements collected by the
Cryosat-2 satellite which reported an annual loss of 159.000 million tons of
the Antartic ice sheet. This represents a 200 % ice loss rate when compared to the
2005-2010 previous survey. This means that adaptation to climate change as well
as mitigation of GHGs should be a priority to the built environment (Kwok and
Rajkovich
2010
; Varias
2013
; Boucher et al.
2014
; Reckien et al.
2014
; Georgescu
et al.
2014
). Even because buildings are responsible for almost 40 % of energy
consumption and energy efficiency improvements show the greatest potential of
any single strategy to abate global GHG emissions from the energy sector (IEA
2012
). And especially because as a consequence of climate change in the last two
decades building cooling needs have increased in an exponential trend going from
6 TJ in 1990 to 160 TJ in 2010 (Balaras et al.
2007
). According to Crawley (
2008
),
''the impact of climate change will result in a reduction in building energy use of
about 10 % for buildings in cold climates, an increase of energy use of up to 20 %
for buildings in the tropics, and a shift from heating energy to cooling energy for
buildings in temperate climates''. Other authors mention that depending on the
climate zone cooling loads are likely to increase by 50 to over 90 % until the end
of the century (Roetzel and Tsangrassoulis
2012
). Cooling needs will also be
aggravated because of urban heat island (UHI) effect, which is one of the major
problems in the twenty-first century posed to human beings as a result of urban-
ization and industrialization of human civilization (Rizwan
2008
). And this sce-
nario will get even worse due to the expected increase in urban population and also
of predict number of deaths due to heat waves (and their synergic effects with air
pollution) that may reach 89,000 deaths/year by the 2050s if no adaptation mea-
sures are taken (Pacheco-Torgal et al.
2015
). This means that the energy efficiency
of the built environment should and must constitute a priority in the field of civil
engineering. However, only some parts of the world, like for instance Europe, are
now start implementing ambitious building energy efficiency policies like for
instance the ''nearly zero-energy building'' concept to be in effect beyond 2020
(Li et al.
2013
; Pacheco-Torgal et al.
2013a
,
b
). Since only several years ago, civil
engineering curriculum starts giving this issue some attention. This means that the
majority of civil engineering curriculum around the world are obsolete concerning
building energy efficiency or the holistic and broader concept of green building
(Zuo and Zhao
2014
; Li et al.
2014a
,
b
).
Another sustainable development serious problem which is directly related to
the field of civil engineering concerns total resource inefficiency. Over the twen-
tieth century, the world increased its fossil fuel use by a factor of 12, whilst
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