- Title
- Building robust housing sector policy using the ecological footprint
- Creator
- McBain, Bonnie; Lenzen, Manfred; Albrecht, Glenn; Wackernagel, Mathis
- Relation
- Resources Vol. 7, Issue 2, no. 24
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/resources7020024
- Publisher
- MDPI AG
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2018
- Description
- The vulnerability of the urban residential sector is likely to increase without the mitigation of growing household Ecological Footprints (energy demand, CO2emissions, and demand for land). Analysis comparing the effectiveness and robustness of policy to mitigate the size of the housing Ecological Footprint has been limited. Here, we investigate three mitigation options: (1) reducing housing floor area, (2) improving the building envelope efficiency, and (3) reducing the carbon intensity of the electricity sector. We model the urban residential Ecological Footprint for a sub-national case study in Australia but analyse the results in the global context. We find that all three mitigation options reduce the Ecological Footprint. The success of policy to reduce household energy demand and land requirements is somewhat dependent on uncertain trajectories of future global population, affluence, and technological progress (together, global uncertainty). Carbon emissions reductions, however, are robust to such global uncertainty. By reducing the Ecological Footprint of the urban residential housing sector we see a reduction in its vulnerability to future global uncertainty, global carbon price, urban sprawl, and future energy shortages. Over the long term, such policy implementation can also be highly cost effective.
- Subject
- housing; ecological footprint; policy; operational energy; Sustainable Development Goals; SDG 11
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1388892
- Identifier
- uon:32827
- Identifier
- ISSN:2079-9276
- Rights
- © 2018 The Authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. (CC BY 4.0).
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities
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