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The Cuajimalpa campus of the Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM) is located in the western region of Mexico City. In 2016, its global average population (students, faculty and staff) was around 2750 people. Campus policies include sustainability as one of its main aims. To evaluate and eventually reduce the environmental impact of the campus, its greenhouse gas (GHG) inventory was assessed and the carbon footprint was calculated, using the GHG protocol (GHGP): Scope 1: direct GHG emissions; Scope 2: indirect GHG emissions; and Scope 3: other indirect GHG emissions, on a calendar year basis. Scope 1 includes mobile and stationary sources and leakage of refrigerants; Scope 2 includes electrical energy usage; Scope 3 includes consumption of paper, food, water, gases, cleaning products, solvents, wastewater treatment, municipal and hazardous wastes and academic travel. In 2016, the campus produced around 3000 tons of CO2 equivalent, with Scope 1, 2 and 3 accounting for 4%, 24% and 72%, respectively. Emissions analysis by activity indicated 51% for commuting; 24% for electricity usage; 14% for academic travel; 11% for other activities. The inventory will aid the establishment of policies for reduction and mitigation of GHG, resulting in environmental and potential economic benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities are mainly responsible for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the atmosphere and thus for climate change. The European Union (EU) set up a series of strategies and policies to facilitate the elaboration of climate change mitigation and adaptation of urban plans. To do this, it is necessary to measure the city's GHG emission level. The Urban Carbon Footprint (UCF) and its derivation, the Relative Carbon Footprint (RCF), represent the most appropriate tools for obtaining this important information. The present paper applies these indicators to a small city (150 000 inhabitants) located in Southern Italy, a novelty for academic studies, which usually concentrate on megacities. The study focuses only on CO 2 emissions, as these represent 90% of the total GHGs released in urban areas. The findings showed that in 2015 the total UCF was equal to 288 ktCO 2 , specifically deriving from electricity and natural gas consumption. Moreover, Residential, Industry and Tertiary are the most carbon-intensive economic sectors. The RCF was equal to 0.30; the city emission levels were lower than the national average. Therefore, the municipality represents a typical “net-consumer” community, dominated by homes with territorial emissions due to consumption and characterized by a low number of industries and an average income per capita that is 50% lower than the national one. Starting from these results, the study proposed an urban action plan according to the EU mitigation and adaptation policies. This plan could help the local government improve its environmental sustainability, even if more public city-level data is required for a more comprehensive analysis. Finally, it would be more appropriate for all actions to be aligned under a unique policy process to seize the opportunity to link the various local intervention policies from different fields, taking into account their existing funding, tools, processes, and resources. Capitalizing on the adaptation/mitigation connection will allow municipalities to leverage their climate change action efforts and accelerate progress toward their climate and energy goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are many opportunities for consumers to design their lives more sustainably. While a rapidly growing body of literature has investigated how consumers can reduce carbon footprints in key consumption areas, such as food, housing and mobility, an overall framework that allows structuring those options across all consumption areas is still missing. Hence, this paper presents a novel and systematic framework to identify improvement options that promote climate change mitigation and structure them based on their primary mode of impact on GHG emissions. The framework targets consumer practices and focuses on ambitious, but technically and socioeconomically feasible strategies for consumers to lower their carbon footprint. Four major categories for reducing consumption-based emissions form the basic framework, which are then subdivided into behavioural strategies and sub-strategies. The practical application of the framework is illustrated by using food consumption as an example. Systematically identifying improvement options can advance a holistic understanding of the range of behavioural strategies targeting consumer choices that operate at different stages in the supply chain. It thus provides a starting point for addressing critical questions related to the role of consumers in supporting climate change mitigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decreasing household size is a global trend, driven by urbanization and multiple other socioeconomic trends. Going solo poses a great environmental challenge, as the possibility to benefit from scale economies in consumption and its greenhouse gas impacts is not taken advantage of. In other words, understanding of intra-household sharing patterns of different consumption categories is increasingly important in climate change mitigation. This paper explores the relationship between household sizes, urban structures, and greenhouse gas impacts of lifestyles. When urban areas grow outwards, the household sizes also grow. As a result of this, the increase in intra-household sharing seems to alleviate the negative GHG implications of urban sprawl, which is highly logical but yet not comprehended. Thus, the rise of collaborative consumption offers potential to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of solo dwellers, and compensate for the lower intra-household sharing with inter-household sharing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the heated discussion of climate change and the ever-increasing demand for fossil fuels, the ability to reduce vehicular carbon footprints is of great importance for both environmental and economical reasons. This paper presents a carbon-footprint/fuel-consumption-aware variable-speed limit (FC-VSL) traffic control scheme that targets minimizing the average vehicular fuel consumption on freeways under live traffic conditions. We first formulated the problem of minimizing fuel consumption for a single vehicle under certain traffic conditions as an optimal control problem. By solving the problem, we obtained the optimal vehicular trajectory, which results in minimum fuel consumption. Then, we designed the FC-VSL scheme based on the optimal trajectory. We evaluated the performance of the FC-VSL scheme through detailed simulation. The results show that the FC-VSL scheme can significantly reduce the average fuel consumption and outperform another speed limit scheme that was designed to smooth traffic flow without considering fuel consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]