City environmental footprint: Insights and application of an innovative LCA-based method to evaluate urban environmental impacts

Abstract

In 2015, the United Nations chose cities as target of the 11th Sustainable Development Goals, which aims to 'make cities inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable'. However, few quantitative methodologies can tackle the sustainability challenge and support cities in this transition. In order to comply with UN SDGs, the City Environmental Footprint (City EF) has been developed. Being systemic and systematic, its aim is the holistic assessment of urban environmental impacts (up to 18), as result of activities performed in key urban sectors (built environment, waste and water management, mobility, production and consumption sectors) by its main stakeholders (e.g. residents, but also important local entities etc.). This facilitates the identification of major hotspots and drivers of impacts in the city, and, based on these, areas of priority interventions and proposals for alternative scenarios. The City EF follows an enhanced LCA-based approach where specific methodological improvements are proposed, both system-related (city as object of investigation), than methodology-related (LCA as effective methodology). Furthermore, a first application of City EF was performed on the city of Leuven (Belgium) to test the method, and its feasibility. The aims of the present contribution are threefold: i) an overview of the City EF, its methodological proposals for urban footprinting, and how it accomplishes to the tasks; ii) provide insights about its first application to the city of Leuven; iii) and critical reflections for future applications, including identified working points and potential research outlooks.