ECOtwins Second Annual Meeting
26/07/2024
The UNESCO Chair in Life Cycle and Climate Change at ESCI-UPF participated in the second annual meeting of the ECOtwins project, held at the University of Copenhagen on July 18th and 19th.
La feria Smart City, líder en desarrollo urbano sostenible, ha acogido la presentación de la investigación sobre sostenibilidad urbana de la Cátedra UNESCO ESCI-UPF. Este evento trabaja para crear ciudades eficientes, inclusivas y sostenibles, en línea con el trabajo realizado en ESCI-UPF.
From 13 to 15th November, Barcelona (Spain) hosted the Smart City Expo World Congress (SCEWC). This event was meant to empower cities and collectivize urban innovation across the globe by promoting innovation, establishing partnerships and identifying business opportunities.
Current initiatives from circular cities such as Rotterdam or Barcelona were presented at the pitch session ‘Solution Talks: The Circular City Lens.’ As a part of this session, Jaume Albertí, researcher and leader of the sustainable construction line at the UNESCO Chair ESCI-UPF, proposed a common basis for working on a sustainability performance indicator, with a life cycle perspective and environmental, social and economic information, aiming at facilitating the comparison and benchmarking of results among cities: “Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of cities with a sustainability perspective.”
According to the researcher, the built environment has been defined by multilateral bodies and the scientific community worldwide as a major world contributor to climate change and environmental impacts, accounting for 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions. After the Paris Agreement, cities have been placed on the spot of both environmental problems and solutions. At the same time, LCA methodology has been demonstrated to be a good tool for the diagnosis of potential environmental impacts. However, there have not been any developments in LCA yet to adapt it to contribute to the sustainability of cities.
Therefore, Albertí showed the attendees how LCA could be applied to cities according to a recent study by researchers at the Chair and the École des Mines de Saint-Étienne (France), published in the journal Science of the Total Environment. “By performing LCA, city-level decision makers will be able to quantify all environmental, social and economic impacts induced by the city’s activities throughout its life cycle. Furthermore, the environmental burden hotspots are provided by this method to increase the effectiveness of the policies and decisions to be taken to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals,” explains Albertí.
This initiative forms part of the tyLCA Project at the Chair, whose next step is to apply this suggested method to a set of pilot cases of study. In this context, “the SCEWC provided us with a unique opportunity to welcome new actors, allowing us to mobilize cities willing to join the project,” highlights Albertí.
The congress hosted more than 18,700 attendees, 700 cities, 675 exhibitors, and 400 speakers.
26/07/2024
The UNESCO Chair in Life Cycle and Climate Change at ESCI-UPF participated in the second annual meeting of the ECOtwins project, held at the University of Copenhagen on July 18th and 19th.
13/06/2024
Our researchers, Pere Fullana-i-Palmer and Ilija Sazdovski, collaborated with Harrison Tetteh, Rita Puig, and Mercè Balcells from the University of Lleida, and María Margallo and Ruben Aldaco from the University of Cantabria published a scientific research paper emphasizing the importance of extension of the shelf-life of products in Life Cycle Assessment.
13/06/2024
The UNESCO Chair in Life Cycle and Climate Change at ESCI-UPF joins forces with the Catalan Institute of Health and ISGlobal on the CATALYSE Project to help mitigate the effects of climate change at the Catalan Health System.
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