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Outsourcing of urban metabolisms is a phenomenon that has grown exponentially over the last century. It is a cause of vulnerability for cities for two main reasons. They are dependent on distant hinterlands and their consumption induces global environmental impact they do not fully control. This study aims to investigate these two effects of outsourcing through a single, multiscale approach to energy accounting. A spatially differentiated energy flow analysis (EFA) is developed, which includes indicators for dependency, embodied energy and energy losses. Applied to the case of the harbor-industrial area of Saint-Nazaire, France, the results show that the global scale dominates dependency and embodied energy indicators, whereas primary energy losses occur mainly at the domestic scale. The local scale accounts for less than 0.1% of the energy supply and about 6% of indirect flows. The spatial trajectories of some renewables (wood, biofuels, wind electricity) suggest that the energy transition could decrease global dependency, but with a transfer to the domestic level, and not necessarily to the local scale, without a radical change from the port's production system. Moreover, trade-offs could emerge between reducing the amount of embodied energy in foreign countries and using energy losses as a local secondary source, depending on the resource used to generate the losses. This study highlights thus the need to link local transition policies more closely to outsourcing issues in order to allow a comprehensive understanding of the possible transfers in terms of dependency and environmental burdens that may occur in a transition context.
Audrey Tanguy; Jean-Baptiste Bahers; Aristide Athanassiadis. Outsourcing of urban metabolisms and its consequences: A multiscale energy flow analysis of a French port-city. Resources, Conservation and Recycling 2020, 161, 104951 .
AMA StyleAudrey Tanguy, Jean-Baptiste Bahers, Aristide Athanassiadis. Outsourcing of urban metabolisms and its consequences: A multiscale energy flow analysis of a French port-city. Resources, Conservation and Recycling. 2020; 161 ():104951.
Chicago/Turabian StyleAudrey Tanguy; Jean-Baptiste Bahers; Aristide Athanassiadis. 2020. "Outsourcing of urban metabolisms and its consequences: A multiscale energy flow analysis of a French port-city." Resources, Conservation and Recycling 161, no. : 104951.
Hosting more than half of the world population, cities are currently responsible for two thirds of the global energy use and three quarters of the global CO2 emissions related to energy use. As humanity becomes more urbanized, urban systems are becoming a major nexus of global sustainability. Various studies have tried to pinpoint urban energy use drivers in order to find actionable levers to mitigate consumption and its associated environmental effects. Some of the approaches, mainly coming from complexity science and industrial ecology disciplines, use city-scale data to find power-laws relating to different types of energy use metrics with urban features at a city-scale. By doing so, cities’ internal complexity and heterogeneity are not explicitly addressed. Moreover, to our knowledge, no studies have yet explicitly addressed the potential scale dependency of such drivers. Drivers might not be transferable to other scales and yield undesired effects. In the present study, power-law relations are examined for 10 cities worldwide at city scale and infra-city scale, and the results are compared across scales. Relations are made across three urban features for three energy use intensity metrics. The results show that energy use drivers are in fact scale-dependent and are city-dependent for intra-urban territories.
Yves Bettignies; Joao Meirelles; Gabriela Fernandez; Franziska Meinherz; Paul Hoekman; Philippe Bouillard; Aristide Athanassiadis. The Scale-Dependent Behaviour of Cities: A Cross-Cities Multiscale Driver Analysis of Urban Energy Use. Sustainability 2019, 11, 3246 .
AMA StyleYves Bettignies, Joao Meirelles, Gabriela Fernandez, Franziska Meinherz, Paul Hoekman, Philippe Bouillard, Aristide Athanassiadis. The Scale-Dependent Behaviour of Cities: A Cross-Cities Multiscale Driver Analysis of Urban Energy Use. Sustainability. 2019; 11 (12):3246.
Chicago/Turabian StyleYves Bettignies; Joao Meirelles; Gabriela Fernandez; Franziska Meinherz; Paul Hoekman; Philippe Bouillard; Aristide Athanassiadis. 2019. "The Scale-Dependent Behaviour of Cities: A Cross-Cities Multiscale Driver Analysis of Urban Energy Use." Sustainability 11, no. 12: 3246.