GTA Construction News
University of Toronto engineering researchers have launched a first-ever open-source tool to generate construction related emissions budgets for 1,000 cities including Toronto.
The tool uses an environmental input/output model to allocate the global carbon budget estimated from climate models and includes a dashboard where users can look up the carbon budget for their city. The tool could also be used to set emissions budgets for other sectors at a local or regional scale, according to the university’s Engineering News.
The tool uses two methods, a grandfathered and an equally-per-capita method. The former accounts for the fact that cities in the developed world are building at a much higher level of emissions per capita than those in the developing world.
The equally-per-capita method allows each person a quota of emissions to meet their housing, and infrastructure needs so cities with more people get bigger budgets.
Using the grandfathered method Toronto has 21 years left before it exhausts its emissions budget for construction. Under the equally-per-capita method, it has seven years.
“Our model suggests that if we in Toronto want to stay below two degrees of warming, we must reduce emissions associated with construction by between 20 per cent and 40 per cent every year between now and 2050,” said Keagan Rankin, a civil and mineral engineering PhD student at the U of T who is lead author of a paper published in Nature Cities.
The Toronto Green Standard sets sustainable design and performance requirements for private and city-owned developments and applies limits on energy use, greenhouse-gas emissions, and embodied carbon.
A summary of the paper says climate mitigation plans too often overlook urban construction. “Levels of historic greenhouse gas emissions resulting from construction in cities have now been estimated, and rates determined at which cities must reduce construction emissions to stay within climate limits.”
