Dataset Information

Sustainable Design of Urban Rooftop Food-Energy-Land Nexus.

ABSTRACT: Urban rooftop functional design offers a promising option to enable multi-function urban land-use to deliver multiple ecosystem services, e.g., food production by rooftop agriculture and energy supply by installing photovoltaic (PV) panels. To identify the best rooftop utilization strategy considering multiple decision criteria and understand the impact of rooftop solution on the design of urban energy systems, we propose a whole system modeling framework that integrates biogeochemical simulation and multi-objective energy system optimization. We apply the framework to evaluate three rooftop agriculture options, namely, basic rooftop farming, unconditioned greenhouse, and conditioned greenhouse, and one rooftop energy supply option, i.e., PV panels, for an urban energy eco-design case in Shanghai, China. Enabling rooftop agriculture options brings more flexibility to the design and operation of energy systems. PV panels provide cost-optimal solutions, whereas conditioned greenhouse potentially delivers environmentally sustainable land-use by contributing to climate regulation ecosystem services.

SUBMITTER: Jing R

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7663218 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Publications

Sustainable Design of Urban Rooftop Food-Energy-Land Nexus.

Jing Rui R Hastings Astley A Guo Miao M

iScience 20201027 11

Urban rooftop functional design offers a promising option to enable multi-function urban land-use to deliver multiple ecosystem services, e.g., food production by rooftop agriculture and energy supply by installing photovoltaic (PV) panels. To identify the best rooftop utilization strategy considering multiple decision criteria and understand the impact of rooftop solution on the design of urban energy systems, we propose a whole system modeling framework that integrates biogeochemical simulatio ...[more]

PMID: 33225248

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Project description:Household water food and energy (WFE) expenditures, reflect respective survival needs for which their resources and social welfare are inter-related. We developed a policy driven quantitative decision-making strategy (DMS) to address the domain geospatial entities' (nodes or administrative districts) of the WFE nexus, assumed to be information linked across the domain nodal-network. As investment in one of the inter-dependent nexus components may cause unexpected shock to the others, we refer to the WFE normalized expenditures product (Volume) as representing the nexus holistic measure. Volume rate conforms to Boltzman entropy suggesting directed information from high to low Volume nodes. Our hypothesis of causality-driven directional information is exemplified by a sharp price increase in wheat and rice, for U.S. and Thailand respectively, that manifests its impact on the temporal trend of Israel's administrative districts of the WFE expenditures. Welfare mass (WM) represents the node's Volume combined with its income and population density. Formulation is suggested for the nodal-network WM temporal balance where each node is scaled by a human-factor (HF) for subjective attitude and a superimposed nodal source/sink term manifesting policy decision. Our management tool is based on two sequential governance processes: one starting with historical data mapping the mean temporal nodal Volumes to single out extremes, and the second is followed by WM balance simulation predicting nodal-network outcome of policy driven targeting. In view of the proof of concept by model simulations in in our previous research, here HF extends the model and attention is devoted to emphasize how the current developed decision-making approach categorically differs from existing nexus related methods. The first governance process is exemplified demonstrating illustrations for Israel's districts. Findings show higher expenditures for water and lower for energy, and maps pointing to extremes in districts' mean temporal Volume. Illustrations of domain surfaces for that period enable assessment of relative inclination trends of the normalized Water, Food and Energy directions continuum assembled from time stations, and evolution trends for each of the WFE components.

Project description:The development of detailed national pathways towards sustainable food and land systems aims to provide stakeholders with clarity on how long-term goals could be achieved and to reduce roadblocks in the way to making commitments. However, the inability to perfectly capture the relationships between all variables in a system and the unknown probability of future values (deep uncertainty) makes it very difficult to design scenarios that account for the full breadth of system uncertainty. Here we use scenario discovery to systematically explore the effect of different parameter ranges on model outputs, and design resilient pathways to sustainability in which multiple target achievement requires a broad portfolio of solutions. We use a model of the Australian food and land system, the FABLE (Food, Agriculture, Biodiversity, Land-use, Energy) Calculator, to investigate conditions for achieving a sustainable Australian food and land system under scenarios based on the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) 1, 2, and 3 narratives. Here we link the FABLE Calculator with a Monte Carlo simulation tool to explore hundreds of thousands of scenarios. This allows us to identify the ranges of systemic drivers that achieve multiple sustainability targets around diets, net forest growth, agricultural water consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity conservation, and exports by 2050. Our results show that livestock productivity and density, afforestation, and dietary change are powerful influencers for sustainability target achievement. Around 10% of the SSP1 scenarios could achieve all modelled sustainability targets. However, practically none of the scenarios based on SSP2 and SSP3 narratives could achieve such targets. The results suggest that there are options to achieve a more sustainable and resilient Australian food and land-use system with better socio-economic and environmental outcomes than under current trends. However, its achievement requires significant structural changes and coordinated interventions in several components of the domestic food and land system to increase its resilience and environmental and socio-economic performance. Understanding the bounds within which this system needs to change and operate to achieve sustainability targets will enable greater clarity and flexibility during discussions between decision-makers and stakeholders.Supplementary informationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11625-022-01202-2.

Dataset Information

Sustainable Design of Urban Rooftop Food-Energy-Land Nexus.

Publications

Sustainable Design of Urban Rooftop Food-Energy-Land Nexus.

Similar Datasets

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