Carbon Emissions of Infrastructure Development

Abstract

Identifying strategies for reconciling human development and climate change mitigation requires an adequate understanding of how infrastructures contribute to well-being and greenhouse gas emissions. While direct emissions from infrastructure use are well-known, information about indirect emissions from their construction is highly fragmented. Here, we estimated the carbon footprint of the existing global infrastructure stock in 2008, assuming current technologies, to be 122 (-20/+15) Gt CO2. The average per-capita carbon footprint of infrastructures in industrialized countries (53 (± 6) t CO2) was approximately 5 times larger that that of developing countries (10 (± 1) t CO2). A globalization of Western infrastructure stocks using current technologies would cause approximately 350 Gt CO2 from materials production, which corresponds to about 35-60% of the remaining carbon budget available until 2050 if the average temperature increase is to be limited to 2 °C, and could thus compromise the 2 °C target. A promising but poorly explored mitigation option is to build new settlements using less emissions-intensive materials, for example by urban design; however, this strategy is constrained by a lack of bottom-up data on material stocks in infrastructures. Infrastructure development must be considered in post-Kyoto climate change agreements if developing countries are to participate on a fair basis.

The greenhouse gas emissions and mitigation options for materials used in UK construction

“…Savings projected decades into the future may already come too late to prevent catastrophic changes associated with global temperature rises over 2°C, a target many climate scientists predict will be exceeded [38]. Indeed, when viewed through the lens of cumulative carbon emissions, it becomes clear that demand for infrastructure development will inevitably account for a considerable portion of remaining cumulative carbon budgets [39]. Therefore it is imperative to make reductions in the emissions associated with the construction of new infrastructure and maintenance of the existing stock.…”

Six research priorities for cities and climate change

“…Meeting the target of the 2015 Paris climate agreement to keep warming well below 2° C above pre-industrial levels requires staying within a 'carbon budget' and emitting no more than around 800 gigatonnes of CO 2 in total after 2017. Yet bringing the rest of the world up to the same infrastructure level as developed countries (those listed as Annex 1 to the Kyoto Protocol) by 2050 could take up to 350 gigatonnes of the remaining global carbon budget 2 . Much of this growth will be COMMENT disciplines or local or national needs provide little scope for cross-disciplinary projects or comparative analyses between regions.…”

Industrial Ecology: The role of manufactured capital in sustainability

“…metals (31)(32)(33), or the long-term stock and flow dynamics of basic industrial commodities (22,34). The second avenue is to further develop a theoretical concept to describe, quantify, and eventually simulate the physical economy, thereby providing a solid, quantitative description of the interface mediating the coevolution between social and environmental change (35)(36)(37).…”

“…The ambition that Industrial Ecology research would focus on the future has not quickly materialized, although scenarios of the future have become more dominant in recent years (34,38). It seems that the founding generation severely underestimated the existing lack of knowledge and the difficulties of establishing reliable datasets of historical socio-metabolic trajectories to define plausible scenario restrictions.…”

“…The interesting aspect is that those two papers hinted at the possibility of linking the analysis of carbon and energy use more directly to the use of materials. The recent Industrial Ecology literature, including this Special Feature, demonstrates how Industrial Ecology helped to create new insights into de-carbonization and energy efficiency potentials by finding new ways to analyze carbon emissions and energy use in its causal relation to the dynamic of the material industrial metabolism (22,34,(41)(42)(43)(44) and to economic growth (45).…”