Indicator-based urban sustainability—A review

Hiremath, Rahul; Balachandra, P.; Kumar, Bimlesh; Bansode, Sheelratan S.; Murali, J.

doi:10.1016/j.esd.2013.08.004

Cited by 260 publications

(157 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Indicators provide information about an energy system (Guy and Kibert, 1998) and show how well the system is working or help to determine what direction should be taken to address any issues with the system (Hiremath et al, 2013). They can be appropriate tools for communicating and promoting dialogue related to sustainable development between stakeholders, policy makers and the public (Vera and Langlois, 2007) as well as enable decision makers to choose when, how, and where to deploy systems for sustainable development (Buchholz et al, 2007).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modelling the socio-economic impacts of modern bioenergy in rural communities in Ghana

Kemausuor

Bolwig

Miller

2016

Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments

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This study analyses ex-ante socio-economic impacts of biogas systems using a remote rural community in Ghana as a case study. An analysis was performed for a 300 m 3 bio-digester that relies on crop residue and animal manure as feedstock to produce methane gas for cooking using selected bioenergy economic and social indicators. With a 10 percent discount rate, a 30 year bio-digester lifetime and methane tariff starting at US$ 0.7/m 3 , the project will have a Net Present Value of approximately US$ 22,000, 16 year payback and an Internal Rate of Return of 11%. The project will create 4 full time unskilled labour positions during the investment year and 3 positions during operation years. Using methane from the bio-digester for cooking will displace approximately 170 tonnes of firewood per year and save the women in the community a total of 3,400 hours per year not fetching firewood. However, only 5% of households are willing to pay the base tariff of US$ 30 /m 3 with up to 60% willing to pay less than half the monthly tariff. To make tariffs affordable to rural households, there is the need for subsidy schemes from government or relevant agencies.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modelling the socio-economic impacts of modern bioenergy in rural communities in Ghana

Kemausuor

Bolwig

Miller

2016

Sustainable Energy Technologies and Assessments

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“…The proposed evaluation framework will enable smart cities to strengthen their strategic planning efforts and measure their progress [45]. Under this framework, a city's quality of life will be evaluated, findings compared over time, and its progress toward smart city goals monitored in relation to the extent to which its policy goals have been achieved.…”

Section: Methodology and Objectives Of Urban Quality Evaluationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluating Urban Quality: Indicators and Assessment Tools for Smart Sustainable Cities

2018

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Abstract:The analysis of urban sustainability is key to urban planning, and its usefulness extends to smart cities. Analyses of urban quality typically focus on applying methodologies that evaluate quality objectives at environmental, urban, and building levels. Research has shown that a system of indicators can be useful for developing qualitative and quantitative descriptors of urban environments. The first step in this study was to formulate a methodology to measure the quality of urban life based on investigative checklists and objective and subjective indicators, aggregated to develop an index to evaluate a city's level of smart urban quality. The second step was to apply this methodology to evaluate the city of Cagliari (Italy) at the neighbourhood scale, which is considered by literature the most suitable as a self-sufficient spatial unit for showing redevelopment results. In addition to sharing its research findings, this study aims to verify whether the methodology can be applied to similar urban contexts. The main outcomes of this research pertain to opportunities to numerically measure both objective and subjective aspects that affect urban quality. In this way, the most critical areas to be requalified have been highlighted in order to prepare policies congruent with the local context.

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“…Lynch et al explored the characteristics of existing indicator systems, reviewed 22 systems with 377 indicators and a database of 145 candidate indicators were identified [18]. In general, indices for measuring sustainability consist of ecological footprint, environmental sustainability index, genuine progress indicator, human development index and city development index [14,18], and decoupling environmental pressures from economic growth has been proposed as the inter-linked objectives for enhancing cost-effective and operational environmental policies in the context of sustainability [19][20][21][22]. Previous studies on decoupling much more focused on particular sources of environmental pressure, such as natural resource utilization, energy consumption, or pollution emissions [22][23][24], and mostly taken countries or provinces as studied cases, while lacking of the investigations into city level decoupling research [22].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Cities attract a growing number of humans and anthropogenic assets, while natural elements suffer a decrease almost equivalent to the increase in humans and man-made assets [3,12]. During the past years, aiming to improve the understandings on a city's sustainability and served for policy-making and monitoring in reality, sets of indicators for measuring a city's sustainability have been developed by different communities [13,14]. For instance, Voula and Pedersen in their report recognized the need for sustainability indicators as tools for quantifying sustainability performance [15], The National Statistical Institute of Italy presented a provisional list of urban environmental sustainability indicators, which are of particular interest for cities in Italy [16].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emergy-Based City’s Sustainability and Decoupling Assessment: Indicators, Features and Findings

et al. 2014

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Decoupling human well-being and local economic growth from resources consumption and environmental degradation has been recognized as a common vision to meet global sustainability. This paper taking Shenyang city as studied case aims to measure the decoupling process by proposing a set of new emergy-based and efficiency-oriented indicators. Decoupling process was verified in period of 1995-2010, and five new indicators including economic efficiency, the environmental pressure, the emergy-based five-year yield efficiency, the investment cost for decoupling, and the job-opportunities cost for decoupling were developed and applied. The results indicate that decoupling in Shenyang shows an erratic appearance, the trajectory of economic growth, and environmental pressure show absolute decoupling, while that of economic growth and resources utilization shows frequentative bending; emergy-based economic efficiency has been improved and the environmental pressure decreased along with the economic growth but the relative job cost per unit remains almost at the same level. However, this isolated and methodology-oriented case study provided the open-mind understandings to policy-making, thus, a wider scale comparison between different cities should be carried out for more knowledge mining.

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Indicator-based urban sustainability—A review

Cited by 260 publications

References 21 publications

Modelling the socio-economic impacts of modern bioenergy in rural communities in Ghana

Modelling the socio-economic impacts of modern bioenergy in rural communities in Ghana

Evaluating Urban Quality: Indicators and Assessment Tools for Smart Sustainable Cities

Emergy-Based City’s Sustainability and Decoupling Assessment: Indicators, Features and Findings

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