Community Energy and Emissions Solutions

elementslab researchers iterate and measure series of ‘what-if’ urban form experiments from 2020 to 2050 that test alternative energy and emissions reducing policy, code and behavioural interventions.

Project Profile

Sponsor
Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions (PICS)

elementslab Team
Ronald Kellett
Cynthia Girling
Camila Curi
Yilang Karen Kang
Juchan Kim
Yuhao Bean Lu
Alex Scott 

and previously
Jon Salter
Christina Bollo
Brendan Buchanan-Dee
Fausto Inomata
Alix Krahn
Jess MacDaniel

Collaborating Researchers
Mark Jaccard
Rose Murphy
Aaron Pardy
Thomas Budd
Emily Doan
Bradley Elliott
Franziska Forg
Bradford Griffin
Aaron Hoyle
Simon Fraser University EMRG Lab

elementslab researchers are leading the community stream of the ‘Energy Efficiency in the Built Environment’ (EEBE) project, funded by Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions. The EEBE project researches policy, finance, community and building solutions to reduce GHGs in BC’s built environment. The ‘Community Solutions’ subproject focuses on evaluating energy and emissions reduction strategies against different patterns of urban form. To conduct this work, we developed representative urban form archetypes from a spatial analysis of BC communities and apply them to representative areas of six cities in BC.

This research combines econometric future models developed by the EMRG Lab (of contemplated policy, form and behavior variables) with future spatial urban form models. This approach uses “measured visualizations” of archetypal patterns of urban form across “what-if” scenarios for different urban environments representative of the diverse cities and municipalities of British Columbia, Canada. To do this, we developed a spatial simulation approach that allows us to model energy demand, GHG emissions, and select livability indicators for different urban form strategies. The results quantitatively and visually simulate spatially explicit scenarios, exploring interactions and co-benefits among livability and climate mitigation variables.