No abstract

Urban development has made life convenient and comfortable. Travel has become faster, communication has become easier. However, there are externalities that we need to face due to urban development; the ratifi cation of the Kyoto Protocol and its recent enforcement has led signatory countries to limit and propose ways on how to achieve the reduction in emissions by 2012. One aspect of proposed reduction is to make urban development sustainable. Urban development is related to infrastructure systems that generations build for the improvement of the quality of life. Construction of residential and non-residential buildings in cities is part of the infrastructure systems that we need to assess to be able to achieve the 6% reduction limit of carbon emissions. This paper studies the changes of carbon emissions induced by residential construction. To be able to assess the future requirements of society in terms of infrastructure facilities and its sustainability, a study on the historical changes of carbon emissions and the relationship of material requirements to emissions are necessary. The Input-Output Approach coupled with Structural Decomposition Analysis (SDA) is used to analyze the impacts of Japanese residential construction on the environment. The changes in construction technology, emission structure and material manufacturing technology are studied in this paper. It can be shown that these changes contribute to the fl uctuations in the carbon emissions from residential construction during the 15-year study period.