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. GHG emissions through NBS can be avoided through reduced consumption of heating and cooling energy demands at building scale for instance. The extend of GHG emissions is one of the most widely used life cycle impact assessment indicators and the amount avoided is usually employed during scenario comparisons - The total amount of Greenhouse gas emissions avoided as a result of implementation of specific NBS.
- Comparison with calculations of carbon consumption of equivalent non-NBS actions (e.g. through Life Cycle Assessment).
- Close relation to energy consumption at building scale.
- Calculation of avoided GHG emissions (Pan et al., 2016).
- Improve comfort in buildings and at street level through increased energy savings at building and street level by the insulating effect of plants (Alexandri and Jones, 2008; Zinzi and Agnoli, 2011; Malys, 2016).
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Scale as linked to D2.2 framework | - National
- City
- Neighborhood
- Street
- Household
- Object
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Data source [ link to data framework] | - Commercial life cycle databases
- Direct measurements from sources
- Energy consumption data to obtain life cycle GHG emissions
- National GHG inventories
- Country-by-country estimates of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion by the International Energy Agency
- Data on global, regional and national fossil fuel CO2 emissions from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory
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Data Needs | - CO2-equivalent emission is the amount of CO2 emission that would cause the same time-integrated radiative forcing, over a given time horizon, as an emitted amount of a long-lived GHG or a mixture of GHGs.
- The equivalent CO2 emission is obtained by multiplying the emission of a GHG by its Global Warming Potential (GWP) for the given time horizon. For a mix of GHGs, it is obtained by combining the equivalent CO2 emissions of each gas.
- Equivalent CO2 emission is a standard and useful metric for comparing emissions of different GHGs but does not imply the same climate change responses.
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Expected Outputs | |
Calculation methods | - The indicator related to GHG emissions can be quantified at two different levels; midpoint level (accounting of equivalent CO2 emissions) and endpoint level (human and ecosystem health impacts).
- No specific tool required for midpoint assessment.
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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.
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