2.3.4 Avoided emission through building energy efficiency improvement and renewable integration

Social challenge/ impact linked to:

Co-creation phase linked to:

Level of importance

Description

Climate change causes a number of environmental mechanisms that affect both the endpoint human health and ecosystem health. Climate change models are in general developed to assess the future environmental impact of different policy scenarios. Greenhouse gases emission indicators encompass a variety of measurements on the emission and concentration of Greenhouse gases. Greenhouse gases are those gaseous constituents of the atmosphere, both natural and anthropogenic, that absorb and emit radiation at specific wavelengths within the spectrum of thermal infrared radiation emitted by the Earth‘s surface, the atmosphere itself, and by clouds. This property causes the greenhouse effect. This indicator measures the emissions of the six main GHGs which have a direct impact on climate change.

This indicator aim to quantify the amount of greenhouse gases (GHG) avoided as a result of implementation of NBS at the building scale. GHG emissions through NBS can be avoided through reduced consumption of heating and cooling energy demands at building scale for instance.

Scale as linked to D2.2 framework

• Building

Data source [ link to data framework]

• Data need to be collected manually by the project personnel.

Data Needs

• A net additional area of green infrastructure
• % building(s) energy consumption, disaggregated by uses
• Yearly energy use

Expected Outputs

• Quantitative

Calculation methods

• Calculation will use the existing tool, GI-Val (https://www.merseyforest.org.uk/services/gi-val/)

Links and references

• Goedkoop, M., Heijungs, R., Huijbergts, M., Schryver, A.D., Struijs, J., van Zelm, R., 2009. ReCiPe 2008 A life cycle impact assessment method which comprises harmonised category indicators at the midpoint and the endpoint level First edition Report I: Characterisation. URL: https://www.leidenuniv.nl/cml/ssp/publications/recipe_char acterisation.pdf Date of access: November 2017.
• Gerdes, H., Bassi, S., Portale, E., Mazza, L., Srebotnjak, T., Porch, L., 2011. In Stream, D2.2 Final Report: Evaluation of Indicators for EU Policy Objectives. URL: https://www.ecologic.eu/sites/files/publication/2016/1901- final-report-d2-2-evaluation-of-indicators-for-eu-policy objectives.pdf Date of access: November 2017.
• https://ghgprotocol.org/calculation-tools
• https://www.merseyforest.org.uk/services/gi-val/