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Consideration of the impact of climate change has penetrated urban infrastructure planning worldwide, and the water sector is no exception. This paper provides an approach to incorporate a low-carbon consideration and climate externalities into an environmental economic analysis for an urban water treatment work planning with a case study from Ningbo, China. The discounted incremental costs are calculated with carbon footprint accounting. The analysis confirms that the inclusion of GHG emission costs as a component in the techno-economic criteria affects the priority ranking for the siting options, and may lead to an entirely different decision on the siting of the water supply facility. However, these criteria should be cross-examined with a sensitivity test during the decision making process, with the discounting rate and carbon pricing level being the main sensitivity factors. This study suggests that the benchmark discount rate for the water supply infrastructure average incremental economic cost accounting should be decreased from 6% to 4.5–4.0%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the reasons for ever growing energy consumption in buildings and to give enhanced supervision strategies for reduction of building energy consumption compared to regular ones. A case study of Ningbo city was used to make a detail analysis. Several factors were determined as the reasons for ever growing building energy consumption including climate change, household electricity load increase, the growth of real estate, fast-growing household electrical appliances, high energy consumption in existing buildings, changes in industrial structure and the lack of enhanced government supervision. Then the discussion of suitable countermeasures shows that only enhanced supervision strategies are currently applicable. Finally, it is concluded that enhanced government supervision strategies, including the establishment of a strict control system for new built buildings through information integration and encryption, establishing an energy efficiency supervision system of large-scale public building and a carrot-and-stick approach with added expert checklist for the building application of renewable energy, showed great advantages in promoting building energy efficiency in Ningbo, compared with other cities. These supervision strategies are applicable in other cities as they are in the similar situations in the enforcement of building energy efficiency. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]