Abstract
AbstractUrbanization often entails a surge in urban temperature compared to the rural surroundings: the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect. Such a temperature increase triggers the formation of pollutants worsening the urban air quality. Jointly, bad air quality and UHI affect ecosystems and human health. To alleviate the impacts on the population and the environment, it is crucial to design effective UHI‐mitigation measures. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is an assessment tool able to capture the complexity of urban settlements and quantify their impact. Yet, as currently implemented, LCA neglects the interactions between the built environment and the local climate, omitting the resulting impacts. This study reviews the existing literature, showing the lack of studies that organically include interactions between the built environment and local climate in LCA. This forms the basis to identify the unsuitability of the current LCA framework for comprehensively capturing the impact of urban settlements. To overcome this limitation, this research offers a pathway to expand the LCA methodology, indicating the necessity to (a) couple the LCA methodology with climate models or physical relations that quantify the interactions between the local climate and the built environment; (b) include novel impact categories in LCA to address such interactions; and (c) use existing or ad hoc developed characterization factors to assess the impacts related to the UHI effect. The LCA community can build on the frame of reference offered by this research to overcome the current limitations of LCA and enable its use for a comprehensive assessment of the impacts of UHI and its mitigation measures.
Highlights
Key-words Life Cycle Assessment; urban Life cycle assessment (LCA); urban settlement; heat island; urban heat island mitigation; policy making
This research offers a pathway to expand the LCA methodology indicating the necessity to (1) couple the LCA methodology with climate models or physical relations which quantify the interactions between local climate and built environment; (2) include novel impact categories in LCA to address such interactions; and (3) use existing or ad-hoc developed characterization factors to assess the impacts related to the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect
Because this lack is already a shortcoming in the application of LCA to the built environment, we investigated whether such interactions were included in LCA studies about UHI mitigation measures, as they are the main reason why these measures are put in place
Summary
Key-words Life Cycle Assessment; urban LCA; urban settlement; heat island; urban heat island mitigation; policy making. The same urban settlement characterized by low urban albedo, in the first case, and high urban albedo, in the second case, would be assessed in the same way the variation in albedo may influence both UHI and global climate It results that urban LCAs which omit interactions between urban environment and urban climate are partial and, stakeholders and decision makers, who rely on such studies, inevitably fail to identify, develop, and implement effective climate change adaptation measures. Literature review At present, no published literature exists which investigates by means LCA methodology the mutual interactions between built environment and local climate and the consequent impacts on human health and ecosystems (see: Supplementary Material) Because this lack is already a shortcoming in the application of LCA to the built environment, we investigated whether such interactions were included in LCA studies about UHI mitigation measures, as they are the main reason why these measures are put in place. We investigated the functional unit in the study; whether the use phase—the phase during which the UHI-mitigation strategies exert their effect on urban climate—was included in the studies; which was the scale of application of the study, in case the results related to the functional unit were extended to a different scale; whether the UHI mitigation effect was included in the LCA results
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