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Cities account for 70% of carbon emissions and are therefore a vital driver for climate change. Thus, a city’s main contributing sectors need to be identified. Territorial-based footprints focus on the final energy consumption, which is derived from the stationary and transport sectors. The consumption-based approach is based on consumption data, which are converted into carbon emissions using an input–output model. If the consumption-based approach is applied to an urban district not only emissions in the investigated area are considered, but also those that occur along the supply chain of consumed products in the urban district. The goal of this study was to apply and evaluate two different approaches to calculate an urban district’s carbon footprint to support climate protection management at the local government level. To achieve this goal, these two different approaches were applied to calculate the carbon emissions of the urban district Wedding in Berlin and were compared regarding criteria such as data availability and relevance. The footprints resulted in 400,947 t CO2-eq. for the territorial approach and in 401,371 t CO2-eq. per year for the consumption-based approach, which resulted in 4.61 t CO2-eq and 4.62 t CO2-eq per capita and year, respectively. Methodologically, the two approaches differ significantly, but the total results showed a difference of only 0.1%. Thus, this study cannot verify that the consumption-based approach mostly leads to higher emissions per capita in the Global North. This could be due to lower purchasing power and a higher share of multiple-person households in the relatively poor urban district of Wedding, Berlin. The territorial approach is more suitable to derive measures for local climate action, whereas the consumption-based approach highlights the responsibility of consumers for GHG emissions along the supply chain and the importance of the food sector.
Clara Lenk; Rosalie Arendt; Vanessa Bach; Matthias Finkbeiner. Territorial-Based vs. Consumption-Based Carbon Footprint of an Urban District—A Case Study of Berlin-Wedding. Sustainability 2021, 13, 7262 .
AMA StyleClara Lenk, Rosalie Arendt, Vanessa Bach, Matthias Finkbeiner. Territorial-Based vs. Consumption-Based Carbon Footprint of an Urban District—A Case Study of Berlin-Wedding. Sustainability. 2021; 13 (13):7262.
Chicago/Turabian StyleClara Lenk; Rosalie Arendt; Vanessa Bach; Matthias Finkbeiner. 2021. "Territorial-Based vs. Consumption-Based Carbon Footprint of an Urban District—A Case Study of Berlin-Wedding." Sustainability 13, no. 13: 7262.
Different LCA methods based on monetization of environmental impacts are available. Therefore, relevant monetization methods, namely Ecovalue12, Stepwise2006, LIME3, Ecotax, EVR, EPS, the Environmental Prices Handbook, Trucost and the MMG-Method were compared quantitatively and qualitatively, yielding results for 18 impact categories. Monetary factors for the same impact category range mostly between two orders of magnitude for the assessed methods, with some exceptions (e.g., mineral resources with five orders of magnitude). Among the qualitative criteria, per capita income, and thus the geographical reference, has the biggest influence on the obtained monetary factors. When the monetization methods were applied to the domestic yearly environmental damages of an average EU citizen, their monetary values ranged between 7941.13 €/capita (Ecotax) and 224.06 €/capita (LIME3). The prioritization of impact categories varies: Stepwise and Ecovalue assign over 50% of the per capita damages to climate change, while EPS and LIME3 assign around 50% to mineral and fossil resource use. Choices regarding the geographical reference, the Areas of Protection included, cost perspectives and the approach to discounting strongly affect the magnitude of the monetary factors. Therefore, practitioners should choose monetization methods with care and potentially apply varying methods to assess the robustness of their results.
Rosalie Arendt; Till Bachmann; Masaharu Motoshita; Vanessa Bach; Matthias Finkbeiner. Comparison of Different Monetization Methods in LCA: A Review. Sustainability 2020, 12, 10493 .
AMA StyleRosalie Arendt, Till Bachmann, Masaharu Motoshita, Vanessa Bach, Matthias Finkbeiner. Comparison of Different Monetization Methods in LCA: A Review. Sustainability. 2020; 12 (24):10493.
Chicago/Turabian StyleRosalie Arendt; Till Bachmann; Masaharu Motoshita; Vanessa Bach; Matthias Finkbeiner. 2020. "Comparison of Different Monetization Methods in LCA: A Review." Sustainability 12, no. 24: 10493.
Carbon offsets as an additional measure to mitigate climate change are on the agenda in recent years. This study analyzes the three carbon offsetting programs (the Clean Development Mechanism, the Verified Carbon Standard and the Gold Standard) with the largest market shares by systematically comparing their standard documents with environmental Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) standards (ISO 14067 and ISO 14040/44). The programs’ most important methodologies are assigned to the sectors forestry, renewable energy, energy efficiency, industrial gas, and waste. We analyzed each sector for its compatibility with LCA using a criteria evaluation scheme to answer the main question, whether the methodologies provide guidance on life cycle emission accounting and what uncertainties they face. The offsetting standards differ from LCA standards due to different analyzed systems, system boundaries and purposes of their methods. Furthermore, offsetting methods always apply scenario analysis. Environmental impacts apart from greenhouse gases are not quantified, rather environmental impact assessments of heterogeneous quality are applied. We find that the approaches in the analyzed carbon offsets are incompatible with the LCA approach, mainly because they always involve scenario analysis, do not include all life-cycle phases and do not account for additional (negative) environmental and social impacts that project activities related to carbon offsets may cause.
Rosalie Arendt; Vanessa Bach; Matthias Finkbeiner. Carbon Offsets: An LCA Perspective. Sustainable Production, Life Cycle Engineering and Management 2020, 189 -212.
AMA StyleRosalie Arendt, Vanessa Bach, Matthias Finkbeiner. Carbon Offsets: An LCA Perspective. Sustainable Production, Life Cycle Engineering and Management. 2020; ():189-212.
Chicago/Turabian StyleRosalie Arendt; Vanessa Bach; Matthias Finkbeiner. 2020. "Carbon Offsets: An LCA Perspective." Sustainable Production, Life Cycle Engineering and Management , no. : 189-212.
Due to current consumption patterns and increasing product complexity, the use of abiotic resources has been rising and has led to supply risk (criticality) challenges in many countries and regions including Europe. The SCARCE method, originally developed to assess criticality in Germany, includes several criticality determinants that are missing from the existing European method by Pennington et al. (2017). Specifically it i) considers additional supply risk and vulnerability categories like price fluctuations, long term availability and importance in future technologies ii) takes a sustainability perspective by including environmental and social aspects of resource use iii) enables the comparison of the European supply risk with the global supply risk. Therefore, we have applied the SCARCE method to perform a criticality assessment of European resource use considering eleven supply risk categories (e.g. trade barriers and political stability) and six vulnerability categories (e.g. economic importance and substitutability) for 42 materials (including metals, metalloids and fossil fuels). In our assessment, the most critical materials for Europe are petroleum oils, gallium, rare earths and phosphorus, because of their high supply risk impacts due to high primary material use, high trade barriers and low political stability in mining countries as well as vulnerability impacts (due to their high economic importance, high utilization in future technologies and low substitutability). The three materials with the worst social performance (considering small scale mining, human rights abuse and geopolitical risk) are tantalum, cobalt and tin (e.g. because of high production share in small scale mining for tin), while the materials with the worst environmental performance (considering greenhouse gas emissions, water scarcity and sensitivity of the local biodiversity) are gold, platinum and niobium (e.g. because of a high amount of associated greenhouse gas emissions for gold). Our findings show that the European supply risk does not differ significantly from the global supply risk, but some assessment categories show different tendencies. Compared to the global production, the mining capacity of the countries that are exporting to Europe is lower, because the European import mix is often dominated by one country only while the global production is more diverse. Further, countries that are currently exporting to Europe have higher political stability than the countries that dominate the global production, which indicates that Europe might have to develop new trade relations with politically unstable countries to meet its domestic material demand. Overall, our assessment results are in line with the finding of the previously conducted study on critical raw materials by the European Union, but provide some additional insights by considering social and environmental impacts.
Rosalie Arendt; Marco Muhl; Vanessa Bach; Matthias Finkbeiner. Criticality assessment of abiotic resource use for Europe– application of the SCARCE method. Resources Policy 2020, 67, 101650 .
AMA StyleRosalie Arendt, Marco Muhl, Vanessa Bach, Matthias Finkbeiner. Criticality assessment of abiotic resource use for Europe– application of the SCARCE method. Resources Policy. 2020; 67 ():101650.
Chicago/Turabian StyleRosalie Arendt; Marco Muhl; Vanessa Bach; Matthias Finkbeiner. 2020. "Criticality assessment of abiotic resource use for Europe– application of the SCARCE method." Resources Policy 67, no. : 101650.