Environmental assessment platform for cities racing to net zero
Environmental assessment platform for cities racing to net zero
The UK was the first major economy to pass a Climate Change Act in 2008, which was revised in 2019 to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. In 2019, Southampton City Council (SCC) declared a climate emergency setting ambitious targets for the city to become carbon neutral under the banner Green City Charter (GCC), which was signed by 70 city-based organisations. There is, however, no specific methodology to quantify progress towards the targets. Here we present the outcomes from developing the GCC Tracker in collaboration with local authorities and stakeholders. The approach is based on the Analytical Hierarchy Process, with expertise agreed weights to measure the success or otherwise of carbon environmental commitments. The outcome is the Green City Tracker encompassing an assessment matrix that provides ratings and quantifies annual progress for achieving committed targets. The Tracker was applied to 10 institutions and the results show their ratings as a function of each sub-criteria and as an overarching rating. The approach highlighted the importance of generating a universally applicable and time/resource efficient processes in order to incentivise organisation participation. The Tracker was widely accepted by regional local authorities with a plan to widely adapt it to other cities declared targets.
Turner, Philip
772d9dd5-829d-4e40-83a2-f8ea70ee2b14
Bahaj, Abubakr
a64074cc-2b6e-43df-adac-a8437e7f1b37
Mahdy, Mostafa
9e2c23e6-a70e-43a0-bfda-626ba4ff4f85
18 November 2021
Turner, Philip
772d9dd5-829d-4e40-83a2-f8ea70ee2b14
Bahaj, Abubakr
a64074cc-2b6e-43df-adac-a8437e7f1b37
Mahdy, Mostafa
9e2c23e6-a70e-43a0-bfda-626ba4ff4f85
Turner, Philip, Bahaj, Abubakr and Mahdy, Mostafa
(2021)
Environmental assessment platform for cities racing to net zero.
Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 2042 (1), [012140].
(doi:10.1088/1742-6596/2042/1/012140).
Abstract
The UK was the first major economy to pass a Climate Change Act in 2008, which was revised in 2019 to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. In 2019, Southampton City Council (SCC) declared a climate emergency setting ambitious targets for the city to become carbon neutral under the banner Green City Charter (GCC), which was signed by 70 city-based organisations. There is, however, no specific methodology to quantify progress towards the targets. Here we present the outcomes from developing the GCC Tracker in collaboration with local authorities and stakeholders. The approach is based on the Analytical Hierarchy Process, with expertise agreed weights to measure the success or otherwise of carbon environmental commitments. The outcome is the Green City Tracker encompassing an assessment matrix that provides ratings and quantifies annual progress for achieving committed targets. The Tracker was applied to 10 institutions and the results show their ratings as a function of each sub-criteria and as an overarching rating. The approach highlighted the importance of generating a universally applicable and time/resource efficient processes in order to incentivise organisation participation. The Tracker was widely accepted by regional local authorities with a plan to widely adapt it to other cities declared targets.
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Published date: 18 November 2021
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Funding Information:
This work is part of the activities of the Energy and Climate Change Division at the University of Southampton (www.energy.soton.ac.uk). This work is also in partnership with Southampton City Council, Winchester City Council and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the King Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia. The work is supported by an EPSRC Impact Acceleration Account (IAA). with partial support by the Ministry of Education in Saudi Arabia through project number 714, coordinated through the Deputyship for Research and Innovation, KAU.
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© Content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence.
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Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
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Local EPrints ID: 452958
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/452958
ISSN: 1742-6588
PURE UUID: 8e0bb435-7c32-4264-b75c-390e2471216c
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Date deposited: 07 Jan 2022 11:46
Last modified: 17 Mar 2024 03:55
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Author:
Philip Turner
Author:
Mostafa Mahdy
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