Towards Digitalized Urban Planning and Design of Low-Carbon Cities: Evolution and Application Review of Assessment Tools

Abstract

Facing the challenges of global climate change, the construction of low-carbon cities has become an inevitable pathway, where carbon emission assessment is a critical part to the transition towards digitalized urban planning and design of low-carbon cities. However, comprehensive review on carbon assessment tools applied to urban planning and design is absent. As a response, this paper selected and reviewed typical digital assessment tools of carbon emissions at both the city and district/neighborhood scales, and summarized their measuring dimensions and reference data. Currently, tools based on energy system planning and operational energy simulation dominate the field, while tools for carbon emission and carbon sink estimations based on land use types or materials are rapidly developing due to the increasing refinement of carbon emission assessments and shifts of decarbonization policies. At present, these tools are primarily used in energy planning and design, governmental decision-making, and building structural design and material choice, and their application in urban planning and design practice, especially in the early stages, remains limited. Hence, this study further underscored the limitations and potential development directions of existing carbon emission assessment tools by case studying low-carbon practices worldwide that have not utilized digital assessment tools—in the future, improving tools' flexibility and adaptability for diverse scenarios, building comprehensive databases, incorporating the calculation of operational carbon, embedded carbon, and carbon sinks, and aligning with the needs for multi-dimensional, multi-criteria, and full-process assessments should be put into more efforts.

● Summarizes five categories of carbon emission assessment tools at both city and district/neighborhood scales

● Summarizes the application scenarios, advantages and disadvantages, measuring dimensions, and reference data of the tools

● Points out the limitations of the tools and proposes the future development trend towards multi-disciplinary, multi-criteria, full-process, and intelligent estimations

Graphical abstract

Keywords

Low Carbon Cities / Carbon Emission / Carbon Emission Assessment Tools / Urban Planning and Design / Digitalization / Carbon Sink

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Acknowledgements

· An Intelligent Evaluation Model for Measuring Quality of Place With the Combined Application of Multi-sourced Urban Data and Deep Learning Algorithms", National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 52078343) · "2022 Industry-University Cooperation Collaborative Education Project", Ministry of Education and Shanghai Tongji Urban Planning and Design Institute Co., Ltd. (No. 220900155145615) · Independent Research Project of "Key Laboratory of Ecology and Energy-saving Study of Dense Habitat (Tongji University)", Ministry of Education and Shanghai Tongji Urban Planning and Design Institute Co., Ltd. (No. KY-2022-LH-A02)

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