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Ways of seeing power and authority
Published in Jeroen Oomen, Imagining Climate Engineering, 2021
One of the major risks is that climate engineering’s moral hazard provides an escape hatch for a corporate business as usual scenario. It is likely that climate engineering will be mobilised by the climate change denial industry, to continue business as usual for as long as possible. While it requires some political manoeuvring and a tacit acceptance of climate change, this would be nothing new. ExxonMobil, BP, and Shell, for example, have been aware of climate change for decades, whilst simultaneously holding the position that ‘the science is still out’ or hiring ‘deniers-for-hire’ (Oreskes and Conway, 2010). Traces of this world are already seen in the rising numbers of climate engineering patents, predominantly for carbon capture technologies as well as for SRM technologies (Oldham et al., 2014), but also in the projected scenarios pushed by large corporations. Royal Dutch Shell, for example, has published several scenarios on future energy needs. In its ‘ambitious goal to achieve net-zero emissions by 2070 within techno-economic possibilities’, negative emissions play a major role (Shell, 2018). Might this move towards negative emission scenarios signify a move away from climate change denialism towards ecomodernist projections of future climate policy?
Low carbon heating and cooling strategies for urban residential buildings — a bottom-up engineering modelling approach
Published in Vincenzo Costanzo, Gianpiero Evola, Luigi Marletta, Urban Heat Stress and Mitigation Solutions, 2021
The framework of the case study is shown in Figure 10.3 with the main information of research steps and of input and output data. Energy modelling for Chongqing residential building stock involved a four-step process as follows:Step 1: based on household categories, built form, and the construction age of the residential stock under investigation, typical archetypes to represent the stock are identifiedStep 2: space heating and cooling energy consumption simulation and aggregation using EnergyPlus software. Computer simulation techniques are used to calculate space heating and cooling energy consumption (more specifically, energy use intensity) for different residential archetypes, to finally aggregate the average energy use intensity and carbon dioxide emissions for residential buildings of different construction age ranges and different archetypesStep 3: stock total floor area calculation and construction age distribution. Calculation of the total floor area of the stock and projections about possible future scenarios. Assigning the floor area into different construction age groups, by considering both the new construction and old buildings demolitionStep 4: weather-adjusted space heating and cooling energy consumption for the entire stock. Collection of past real weather data and generation of “business as usual” future weather via the climate change world weather file generator tool. Heating and cooling degree-days to refine the estimation of space heating and cooling energy consumption of the stock for both past and future time points under different scenarios. Convert space heating and cooling energy consumption into carbon dioxide emissions using CO2 emission factors. Results are eventually validated with reference to various literature and national energy targets
Decoupled net present value: protecting assets against climate change risk by consistently capturing the value of resilient and adaptable investments
Published in Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure, 2023
David Espinoza, Javier Rojo, William Phillips, Andrew Eil
According to some estimates, the impact of climate change on asset values under business-as-usual scenarios could result in write-downs on the order of 17% of global financial asset value (Dietz et al., 2016). As such, deployment of capital to develop resilient and adaptable assets in multiple sectors of the economy to reduce climate risk exposure will be critical to the sustainability of both the private and public sectors. This has been recognized for some time by governments of many countries, and policies are being developed to better quantify the vulnerability of key infrastructure to the impacts of climate change and develop strategies for improving resilience. Likewise, multilateral lenders have increased their focus on promoting climate-change-resilient infrastructure (Bouskela et al., 2016; JRMDB, 2020). Furthermore, to optimize resource allocations and reduce initial costs given the uncertainty of future climate impacts, flexible and adaptive approaches can reduce the costs of incorporating climate resilience into infrastructure investments, as documented in a recent report (Carmody & Chavarot, 2021). The report, prepared by the Coalition for Climate Resilient Investment (CCRI), also describes the increasing awareness within the investment community of the potential risks posed by climate change and the need for innovative sustainable investment practices, including the need for a new paradigm regarding asset valuation and long-term investment plans (page 41).
Exploring the future impacts of urbanization and climate change on groundwater in Arusha, Tanzania
Published in Water International, 2020
Tunde Olarinoye, Jan Willem Foppen, William Veerbeek, Tlhoriso Morienyane, Hans Komakech
Details on the groundwater model calibration and water balance results are given in the online supplemental data. The changes in groundwater levels between 2015 and 2050 were compared for scenarios including business as usual only, as well as combined scenarios of business as usual and climate change. The changes in groundwater levels between 2015 and 2050 in business as usual plus Scenarios A and B yielded a groundwater drawdown pattern, which increased towards the west part of the aquifer and elongated north–south (Figure 2). The north–south elongation of the depression is due to the high difference in head gradient in the slopes of Mount Meru. For Scenario A, in which future rainfall increased by 10%, groundwater levels decreased by 10–55 m in the southern part of the area (Figure 2). This decrease was larger than observed when only urbanization scenarios were considered (40–55 m; Figure S6 in the online supplemental data).
A more-than-human perspective on understanding the performance of the built environment
Published in Architectural Science Review, 2020
Susan Loh, Marcus Foth, Glenda Amayo Caldwell, Veronica Garcia-Hansen, Mark Thomson
While the body of work focussing on built environment mitigation and adaptation to climate change is growing, many approaches are largely hampered by trying to loosely fit within existing ‘business as usual’ approaches. In order to inform our discussion in the next section, here we want to introduce two alternative yet interrelated approaches to imagining a sustainable vision and future for the built environment and ways to achieve those: (1) net positive architecture, and; (2) more-than-human design. We have selected these from a range of visions that imagine more desirable futures on the premise of planetary survival, including sustainment (Fry 2003), cosmopolitan localism (Manzini 2009), transition design (Irwin 2015; Irwin, Kossoff, and Tonkinwise 2015), the Chthulucene (Haraway 2016), and prosperous descent (Alexander 2016), to name a few. For reasons of scope and focus, we will only interrogate net positive architecture and more-than-human design to discuss how their resultant ethical, legal, and methodological concerns can shape a new perspective on understanding the performance of the built environment. However, we encourage readers to investigate the aforementioned concepts and theories from studies in the Anthropocene in fields such as environmental humanities, STS, geography, planning and design, with a view to introduce them to architectural science and building performance studies.