The Role of Urbanization in Energy Sustainability Challenges

The rapid increase of urbanization is creating stress on the world’s resource requirement. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the increasing energy needs of society due to urbanization for energy sustainability. This work develops a tool for estimating energy-related CO₂ emissions due to urbanization based on a regression model. The models are developed considering climatic (heating-degree-days) and urban design (land area per person) as independent variables. The tool is applied on 3,646 urban areas for estimating impact of a) global transitioning to Electric Vehicles, b) urban density change and c) IPCC climate change scenarios on urban emissions. Results show that urban density decline can lead to significant increase in energy emissions (upto 346 % in electricity & 428 % in transportation at 2 % density decline by 2050). The tool can be improved by including more data in the  model along with inclusion of other relevant emissions and climatic variables.