Embodied energy consumption and carbon emissions evaluation for urban industrial structure optimization

Abstract

Cities are the main material processors associated with industrialization. The development of urban production based on fossil fuels is the major contributor to the rise of greenhouse gas density, and to global warming. The concept of urban industrial structure optimization is considered to be a solution to urban sustainable development and global climate issues. Enforcing energy conservation and reducing carbon emissions are playing key roles in addressing these issues. As such, quantitative accounting and the evaluation of energy consumption and corresponding carbon emissions, which are by-products of urban production, are critical, in order to discover potential opportunities to save energy and to reduce emissions. Conventional evaluation indicators, such as “energy consumption per unit output value” and “emissions per unit output value”, are concerned with immediate consumptions and emissions; while the indirect consumptions and emissions that occur throughout the supply chain are ignored. This does not support the optimization of the overall urban industrial system. To present a systematic evaluation framework for cities, this study constructs new evaluation indicators, based on the concepts of “embodied energy” and “embodied carbon emissions”, which take both the immediate and indirect effects of energy consumption and emissions into account. Taking Beijing as a case, conventional evaluation indicators are compared with the newly constructed ones. Results show that the energy consumption and emissions of urban industries are represented better by the new indicators than by conventional indicators, and provide useful information for urban industrial structure optimization.

Keywords

embodied carbon emissions / embodied energy / industrial structure optimization / urban economy

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Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg