Population Equivalent, background data and results

Main Author: Mirabella, Nadia
Other Authors: Allacker, Karen
Format: Dataset
Terbitan: Mendeley , 2020
Subjects:
Online Access: https:/data.mendeley.com/datasets/6v7jnrcdpp
Daftar Isi:
  • INTRODUCTION This excel files contains information and guidelines for the accounting of Population Equivalent, including collected and processed data. Information and data are calculated and accounted for the city of Leuven (Belgium), reference year 2016. Extensive information and full details about the present study are provided in "Towards a sustainable transition of cities: the Population Equivalent as a novel approach to implement urban Life Cycle Assessment studies", submitted to Science of the Total Environment (February 2020). GOAL OF THE STUDY Cities are very complex and unique systems, very diverse in terms of functions, and contexts, that provide a large range of services. not only for its inhabitants but also for additional groups of people. For these reasons, comparisons between cities can be difficult to perform and sometimes meaningless. The goal of the present study is to provide an enhanced functional unit (FU) to support LCA and urban sustainability studies. The enhanched FU takes into account not only the urban population as sum of its residents, but accounts also for the relative use of the existing services provided by the city to a larger audiance of city-users. These city-users are acknowledged based on previous researches about the functional categorization of cities, which each function comes with specific groups of city-users. This FU is based on the concept of Population Equivalent, popular in other domains of environmental engineering. Since the concept is able to summarize and normalize different entities to one single metric, it could be useful for: i) supporting the multi-functionality inherent to cities; ii) overcoming current limitations provided by other FUs; iii) overcoming comparability issues between cities.