Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Sustainable energy
production policies
Renewable energy
production
City planning for
efficiency
Users' trends
consumption pattern
Sustainable
environment
FIGURE 2.3
The relationship among policies for achieving a sustainable environment.
creating many new local jobs at the same time. There are some initiatives
to improve the EE of cities—for example, The Cities for Climate Protection
Program of the ICLEI. This is a performance-oriented campaign, started in
1993, offering a framework for local authorities to reduce global warming
and waste gas emissions all over the world. This framework includes five
performance milestones (which were implemented by 500 local governments
participating in the campaign in 2004) [82]:
1. Conduct an energy and emissions inventory and forecast
2. Establish an emission target
3. Develop and obtain approval for the local action plan
4. Implement policies and measures
5. Monitor and verify results
2.4 City Consumption and City Impact
2.4.1 Ecological Footprint
In order to measure a city's impact versus its consumption, a more sophisti-
cated analysis has been developed by Rees that can calculate a city's ecologi-
cal footprint (EF) [83]. As previously mentioned in Chapter 1, it is based on
an ecological understanding of how a city extracts food, water, energy and
land from a bioregion (and beyond) and what ecosystem services it requires
to absorb its wastes. The total resource use of a city is figured relative to its
population, and the resulting calculation allows a per capita footprint of land
to be compared to that of other cities [84].
