Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
The fourth type of assessment combines various environmental impacts
into a common metric to facilitate comparisons over time and space. Both
development attributes and consumptive patterns of residents or businesses
occupying the space [14] are considered to provide some prescriptive infor-
mation on how to improve the built form (e.g. ecological footprint). However,
in order to be comprehensive, data assembly and the translation of various
activities into a common metric become challenging [9].
Chapter 1 has highlighted the Human Development Initiative—where the
ecological footprint and HDI have been combined. The initiative targeted
how countries in the quest to achieve higher HDI consume (or not) their
environmental resources and whether current development actions are sen-
sitive to the country's ecological capacity or not.
3.3.1 Indices to Rate Urban Agglomerations
Globally, tools for evaluating cities are not as widely available as they are for
buildings. There is a growing demand for tools to evaluate measures and
activities on the scale of a city or a society as a whole. Currently, there are
a number of indices to rate urban agglomerations varying in scale and thus
the criteria or indicators they monitor or rate. Among these indices related
to the urban scale are CASBEE for urban development and CASBEE for cities
in Japan, LEED for neighbourhoods in the United States, and the Green City
Index developed by the EIU and Siemens. Other indices related to assessing
the sustainability of settlements that are tailored to local circumstances
include megacity sustainability indicators in Brazil [15], the Sustainability
Cities Index rating the biggest 20 cities in the United Kingdom [16] and the
Freiburg Charter for Sustainable Urbanism [17].
3.3.1.1 Comprehensive Assessment System for
Building Environmental Efficiency (CASBEE)
CASBEE is a tool developed in Japan under the leadership of the Ministry of
Land, Infrastructure and Transport. It has several scales, such as for housing
and offices, and in recent years, the ministry has been working on develop-
ing a low-carbon version of CASBEE for cities. Included in the process are
the CASBEE tool for housing and other buildings as well as a tool for urban
development and a tool for evaluating a city as a whole. The building and
urban development tools were completed in 2007, and a third comprehensive
tool was released in 2011 [18]. One fundamental principle guiding this effort
is the need to reduce environmental loads and to create a low-carbon society
while also improving the QOL. Clear, simple and comprehensive evaluation
results should also be presented in a visual format, which is very important
in obtaining consensus from the general public [19].
One example of the application of the CASBEE tool for urban development
is Harumi Triton Square, a large-scale urban redevelopment area located
