Decarbonisation is the process of reducing carbon emissions (mainly CO2) into the atmosphere. It aims to achieve a low-emission global economy that achieves neutrality through energy transition.
DESCARBONIZACIÓN DE BARRIOS
Achieving carbon neutrality has become a goal for many cities. To this end, numerous initiatives have been proposed for decades to establish a plan to achieve this ambitious goal.
This project has developed a methodology to assess specific actions that contribute to creating a climate-neutral city. Firstly, an inventory of the carbon footprint of the districts/neighbourhoods of Valencia was obtained. Thanks to this, it has been possible to carry out a diagnostic analysis of the carbon footprint at city, district and even neighbourhood level. This has allowed us to analyse the causes of these emissions and evaluate the impact of different actions to reduce them.
In the specific case of Valencia, photovoltaic self-consumption presents the best benefits for reducing direct emissions in the city. Among the possible implications of this measure, it would be necessary to generate greater awareness of community PV systems in cities and to streamline understanding and regulation procedures in order to reach the city’s potential as soon as possible.
When adding the indirect emissions produced due to Scope 3, the reductions decrease to 10%. Although none of the measures alone have shown reductions of more than 5%, the implementation of a 15-minute district will be the single most important measure.
15-minute district will be the most beneficial measure if the aim is to reduce indirect and direct emissions.
Other needs would be a more detailed study of the mobility of the area, with a better understanding of the established social and economic dynamics. Furthermore, with these results, it is possible to conclude that European initiatives are leaving out many emissions that should be considered in relation to climate-neutral cities.
On the other hand, it can be combined with a future monitoring system of activities in the city to obtain near real-time GHG emissions on a neighbourhood scale and find out their causes. Also, the strong need for reliable data at the local scale and the lack of availability of such data has made it necessary to rely on other studies. This has been slightly unfavourable for a fully bottom-up methodology.
