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Scenario-based carbon footprint inventory tool for urban sustainable development decision support: The Cincinnati Case Study
Citation:
Wei, H., Z. Yao, X. Wang, H. Liu, AND J. Yang. Scenario-based carbon footprint inventory tool for urban sustainable development decision support: The Cincinnati Case Study. Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting, Paper #14-3242, Washington, DC, January 12 - 16, 2014.
Impact/Purpose:
Science communication of research results on urban adaptation to science community
Description:
Rapid growing of travel demand and transportation activities and co-occurring land use changes have resulted in traffic congestion and negative impacts on the environment, energy consumption and green house gas (GHG) emissions in an urban environment. The challenge lies in quantifying and assessing the environmental impacts, for example in form of carbon footprint, attributable to the combined effects of and interactions between land use changes, traffic operations, air emissions, and local developmental policy objectives. This requires a systems modeling analysis in a methodology that still waits to emerge. This paper presents a transferable framework to fill in the gap through developing Geographical Information System (GIS)-based integrated analysis software, Air Impact Relating Scenario-based Urban Settings and Transportation Assets In Network (Air-SUSTAIN) system, housed in the Scenario-Based Planning Support System (SB-PSS). The Air-SUSTAIN system is established by heuristically and mathematically integrating the land use change model, travel demand forecasting model, vehicle emission model, with data flows via input/output (I/O) interfaces. Based on a case study in the Cincinnati metropolitan area, it has shown that the Air-SUSTAIN is a powerful tool to provide decision makers with supporting scientific data and scenario results. The case study also shows that by using the planning-based policy incentive - infill development, the region could achieve up to 13% carbon emission reductions comparing to the baseline of current developmental policy. This case study on the sustainability quantization analysis demonstrated the utility of Air-SUSTAIN software as an effective tool to support decision making toward sustainable urban infrastructure development.
URLs/Downloads:
http://trid.trb.org/view.aspx?id=1288731
http://www.trb.org/AnnualMeeting2014/annualmeeting2014.aspx