The population living in urban areas of the world continues to grow rapidly. It is, thus, a great priority for the planning practice to embed sustainability concept in their urban development endeavors. Currently, development and expansion of urban systems stress the need to control consumption of resources, especially non-renewable ones. There is also a need to reduce related environmental impacts, while stimulating a sustainable pathway for the population and urban growth.
MethodsStrategic environmental assessment (SEA) is useful for policy design to build an integrated method for supporting the development of a sustainable society. It undertakes territorial assessments and describes urban flows and impacts related to them by using a variety of tools, including material flow accounting (MFA). This study employs MFA, as it fits well within the scope of SEA and supports the growing environmental attention in the urban metabolism approach. Although helpful, MFA has not been systematically applied in the urban development context; for this reason, this paper proposes the integration of SEA and MFA.
Results and discussionIntegration of SEA and MFA generates a new framework for sustainable development planning. The framework is structured in phases oriented to the continual improvement based on the Deming cycle (i.e., plan, do, check, act), a key management approach mainly used in businesses for improving the effectiveness of an organization. It can also be implemented at the urban system level. In order to maintain normative compliance, each process (urban planning, strategic environmental assessment with urban metabolism approach, participatory processes) is standardized in line with a common and mandatory approach. While the processes are integrated among them, highlighting the reciprocal contact points, the results are combined in a holistic perspective. The framework, hence, transforms the voluntary MFA tool into a mandatory process.
ConclusionsThe proposed SEA-MFA framework has the potential to unify and standardize the processes of categorizing and quantifying data in order to improve the understanding of urban metabolic principles and scale effects. It also supports management and policy development and meets the requirements of different stakeholders. The framework, thus, generated a novel approach for sustainable urban development planning by providing solutions for specific policy problems and ensuring urban ecological balance and sustainable urban futures.
相似文献Purpose
Several damages have been associated with the exposure of human beings to noise. These include auditory effects, i.e., hearing impairment, but also non-auditory physiological ones such as hypertension and ischemic heart disease, or psychological ones such as annoyance, depression, sleep disturbance, limited performance of cognitive tasks or inadequate cognitive development. Noise can also interfere with intended activities, both in daytime and nighttime. ISO 14'040 also indicated the necessity of introducing noise, together with other less developed impact categories, in a complete LCA study, possibly changing the results of many LCA studies already available. The attempts available in the literature focused on the integration of transportation noise in LCA. Although being considered the most frequent source of intrusive impact, transportation noise is not the only type of noise that can have a malign impact on public health. Several other sources of noise such as industrial or occupational need to be taken into account to have a complete consideration of noise into LCA. Major life cycle inventories (LCI) typically do not contain data on noise emissions yet and characterisation factors are not yet clearly defined. The aim of the present paper is to briefly review what is already available in the field and propose a new framework for the consideration of human health impacts of any type of noise that could be of interest in the LCA practice, providing indications for the introduction of noise in LCI and analysing what data is already available and, in the form of a research agenda, what other resources would be needed to reach a complete coverage of the problem. 相似文献Uncertainty analyses in life cycle assessment (LCA) literature have focused primarily on the life cycle inventory (LCI) phase, but LCA experts generally agree that the life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) phase is likely to contribute even more to the overall uncertainty of an LCA result. The magnitude of perceived uncertainties in characterization relative to that in LCI, however, has not been examined in the literature. Here, we use the pedigree approach to gauge the perceived uncertainty in the characterization phase relative to the LCI phase. In addition, we evaluate the level of approval on the pedigree approach as a means to characterize uncertainty in LCA.
MethodsApplying the Numeral Unit Spread Assessment Pedigree (NUSAP) approach to environmental risk assessment literature, we extracted the criteria for evaluating the uncertainty in the characterization phase. We used expert elicitation to identify a pool of experts and conducted a survey, to which 47 LCA practitioners from 12 countries responded. In order to reduce personal biases in perceived geometric standard deviation (GSD) values, we used two reference questions on weight and life expectancy at birth for calibration.
ResultsNearly half (49%) of respondents expressed their approval to the pedigree matrix approach as a means of characterizing uncertainties in LCA, and responses were highly sensitive to the respondent’s familiarity with the pedigree matrix. For instance, respondents who are highly familiar with the pedigree matrix were more polarized, with 15% and 19% of them expressing either strong approval or strong disapproval, respectively. Respondents less familiar with the pedigree approach were generally more favorable to its use. Compared with LCI, variability in characterization factors was influenced more strongly by geographical correlation and reliability of the underlying model, which showed 11 to 16% larger average GSDs when compared with the comparable criteria for LCI. Conversely, temporal correlation criterion was a less significant factor in characterization than in LCI.
Conclusions and discussionOverall, survey respondents viewed LCIA characterization as only marginally more uncertain than LCI, but with a wider variability in responses on characterization than LCI. This finding indicates the need for additional research to develop more thorough methods for characterizing uncertainties in life cycle impact assessment that are compatible with the uncertainty measures in LCI.
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