Module 4 — City Performance Indicators and Methods of Assessment
Lesson 9 of 13Module 4 Summary

This is a recap of the material covered in Module 4. Here is a summary of what was presented, why it matters, and how you can put to practice the knowledge and skills from this module.

  • Urban metabolism is the sum total of the technical and economic processes that occur in cities, resulting in growth, production of energy, and elimination of waste.

  • The urban metabolism concept was first introduced in 1965, and then advances to the model were added in the 1990s to include the connection with sustainable development of cities and to later include the anthroposphere.

  • Emergy has scientific roots in thermodynamics and systems ecology, and it joins the two words referring to EMbodied enERGY.

  • Material flow analysis (MFA), as it applies to urban systems expresses a city’s flow of resources in terms of mass fluxes, it measures the materials flowing into a system, the stocks and flows within it, and the resulting outputs from the system to other systems in the form of pollution, waste, or exports.An environmental life cycle assessment of an infrastructure system in urban settings quantifies the direct and indirect environmental impacts (eg. greenhouse gas emissions, air pollutants, acidification, eutrophication) over the life of the infrastructure.

  • An environmental life cycle assessment of an infrastructure system in urban settings quantifies the direct and indirect environmental impacts (eg. greenhouse gas emissions, air pollutants, acidification, eutrophication) over the life of the infrastructure.

  • Earlier Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) studies in the United State and Europe were motivated by the need to support decision-making, learning and exploring options, communicating impacts to interested groups or the wider public.

  • The principles of GHG inventories include the gases considered, geographic boundaries, emissions attributions, calculation, emissions classification, data precision and reporting format.

  • The calculation of GHG emissions applies an emission factor-based methodology in an equation that is a result of activity data multiplied by an emission factor.