LASER - Lifecycle Assessment Synthesized with Ecosystems and Risk
Companies and governments use forest natural climate solutions (fNCS) for their carbon-absorbing capabilities. However, inaccuracies and oversimplifications in carbon accounting often cloud the true impact of fNCS on climate change. Standard assessments inaccurately deem forest biomass carbon neutral or negative, failing to account for emissions from soil and other changes post-harvest, and improperly considering forest regrowth as additional carbon sequestration. Despite critiques in academia, many models still assume forest carbon neutrality, and those that do not tend to lack spatial detail, be overly simplistic, or overlook climate risks. This narrow carbon-centric view risks compromising conservation and community well-being.
This project introduces LASER (Lifecycle Assessment Synthesized with Ecology and Risk) to measure carbon dynamics accurately throughout the fNCS lifecycle, taking into account spatial details and various risks, ensuring a balanced evaluation of fNCS sustainability. LASER is applied to bioenergy, short-lived forest products, and timber in Brazil, Canada, and the United States, merging insights from diverse fields such as forest ecology, industrial ecology, geospatial science, and political ecology.
Funding: U-M Biosciences Initiative - Ideas Lab
Status: Starts Fall 2024.
Currently seeking postdoc for this project. More details here.
Urban Symbiosis
Cities are global loci of material and energy use and waste generation. Curbing demand for raw resources by circulating urban waste flows will be indispensable as societies transition towards low-carbon, resource efficient futures.1 To do this, designers, entrepreneurs, citizens, policymakers and academics varyingly advocate for increased symbiosis in cities in the form of mutually beneficial material and energy exchange between different actors in and around cities.
This raises two primary questions:
- Are there different forms of symbiosis in cities?
- If so, what are the attributes of these different forms of symbiosis and what roles might they play in future urban sustainability?
This project answers these questions by:
- Developing a typology of symbiosis in cities through a literature review of existing studies of material and energy sharing in cities.
- Documenting the motivations and outcomes of ongoing urban symbiosis projects in London, UK.
Collaborators: Community non-profits in London, UK.
Status: Ongoing.
The Carbon Footprint of US Household Energy Use
Residential energy use causes ~20% of US carbon emissions, yet data gaps limit analysis of emissions drivers and mitigation strategies. This project used ‘big data’ to estimate emissions from 93 million individual homes, finding that emissions by wealthy Americans are higher than those of low-income residents, driven primarily by larger homes. Scenarios showed that some states can meet the Paris Agreement through grid decarbonization, while others also need ‘deep energy retrofits’, distributed low-carbon energy systems, and smaller new homes. This work was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2020), where it received media coverage from CNN, Associated Press, Scientific American, and was one of the Top 10 research outputs from the University of Michigan in the past decade. Analysis of energy use along lines of race and ethnicity revealed that per capita emission in Communities of Color are higher than in majority Caucasian neighborhoods, even though the latter live in more energy efficient homes. Although smaller homes in Communities of Color explain some of this difference, we showed that this “emissions paradox” is also a consequence of racist, mid-century housing policies that funneled disadvantaged communities into sub-standard housing and forestalled retrofits. Results published in Energy Research and Social Science (2021).
Collaborators: The Urban Sustainability Research Group and Urban Energy Justice Lab at the University of Michigan.
Funding: Generously supported by the National Science Foundation's Environmental Sustainability program.
Status: Complete (2019-2022).
Tracking Corporations Across Space and Time (TRACAST)
Urban consumption impacts distant ‘elsewheres’ via opaque supply chains that cross borders and oceans. This work with Joshua Newell develops a method, TRACAST, to uncover the inner-workings of supply chains; the links between companies, the environmental and social hotpots, and the key nodes of governance. TRACAST empirically connects urban consumption to disruptive environmental and social change at specific, distal locations, with implications for how researchers measure and theorize urban sustainability. Focusing on the corporations that ‘move and shape’ the economy explores the complexity and challenges of sustainable production in a globalized world. Early case work has linked US transnationals to rubber from Sri Lankan biodiversity hotspots and illegally harvested Russian wood. This work has been published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology (2019), Ecological Economics (2019), Journal of Cleaner Production (2021), and Journal of Environmental Management (2021).
Status: Ongoing.
The Urban FEW-Meter
Large-scale urban agriculture has the potential to substantially disrupt the interconnected water, energy and food systems of cities (the ‘food-energy-water nexus’). This ongoing Belmont Forum project develops a comprehensive database of resource use by ~100 farms in five cities across Europe and North America and uses scenarios to clarify the effects of up-scaling urban farming on the urban FEW nexus. Data on the impact of urban farms on diets, farmer livelihoods, and community development are also collected to appraise urban agriculture across environmental, social and economic dimensions. Preliminary findings suggest that urban agriculture can be a sustainable substitute for conventional agriculture, but that these benefits are only sustained if urban farming is not a transitory land use due to the significant embodied impacts in farm infrastructure.
Collaborators: University of Kent, The University of Michigan, the City University of New York, AgroTech Paris, ILS, and Poznan University of Life Sciences.
Funding: Generously supported by the Belmont Forum and the National Science Foundation.
Status: Complete (2018-2023).
