Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
a part of the overall indicators comprising the notion of quality of life as
viewed by other indices.
This index is still under development by the secretariat of the CPI, an
expert group formed by UN-HABITAT to discuss and develop the used
indicators.* The main debates about indicators are which ones to mea-
sure, their relative weights, whether they represent the average versus real
citizen's quality of life, and the use of objective versus subjective indicators.
This is still not clearly resolved in the CPI, thus leaving much space for
debating its representation of reality.
Another recent addition to the list is the International Ecocity Framework
and Standards (IEFS) developed by the Ecocity Builders and the British
Columbia Institute of Technology, Canada [46]. It is still under develop-
ment but has similar categories and indicators as the Green City Index.
However, it depends on more qualitative assessment rather than quantita-
tive assessment, which can serve better when using participatory evaluation
of environmental performance of districts and cities.
1.5.1 Quality of Life, Energy Efficiency and Renewable
Energies in the Built Environment
Despite the involvement of the Green City Index in measuring energy effi-
ciency as part of achieving environmental sustainability, it does not explicitly
correlate to measuring how much energy is used to attain a certain quality
of life for city dwellers. Thus, the indicators concerning energy efficiency
in the Green City Index are first extracted from different categories and
highlighted. As mentioned earlier, the Green City Index was originally sub-
divided into eight categories: CO
2
emissions, energy, buildings, transport,
water, waste and land use, air quality and environmental governance, and
30 individual indicators. In each report, the EIU aggregated categories differ-
ently combining energy and CO
2
, creating a separate category for land use
or combining it with buildings, and creating a separate category for sanita-
tion. A review of the indicators of each category in different reports and
their relevance to energy efficiency resulted in the list of indicators shown in
Table 1.1 (common indicators in different reports are highlighted) [44,47-50].
It is clear that similar indicators are used in all reports. However, other indi-
cators are tailored to certain areas according to the state of things and to
available information [51]. Second, these energy efficiency indicators can be
classified into two groups: the first group relates directly to the energy used
to achieve a good quality of life, while the other group relates indirectly to
the matter and is more concerned with sustaining this quality of life from
the point of using energy efficiently. Table 1.2 shows this classification of
indicators.
*
A series of Expert Group meetings started in May 2013 in Tehran to discuss the validity of
the index, which continued in Nairobi in June 2013 for further development.
