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  • © 2017

Creating Low Carbon Cities

  • Presents very timely contributions with practical implications

  • Maximises understanding of co-benefits and co-costs of climate action plans for low-carbon cities

  • Explains low-carbon urban infrastructure, design and waste management

  • Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

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Table of contents (16 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-x
  2. Challenges and Opportunities for Transition to Low Carbon Cities

    • Shobhakar Dhakal, Matthias Ruth
    Pages 1-4
  3. Big Data, People, and Low-Carbon Cities

    • Paul Fleming
    Pages 5-13
  4. Co-benefits and Co-costs of Climate Action Plans for Low-Carbon Cities

    • Matthias Ruth, Sanchari Ghosh, Sahar Mirzaee, Nancy S. Lee
    Pages 15-28
  5. Emerging Low-Carbon Urban Mega-Projects

    • Federico Caprotti
    Pages 51-62
  6. Energy Consumption and Emissions Assessment in Cities: An Overview

    • Lucia Alexandra Popartan, Francesc Morata
    Pages 63-74
  7. Low Carbon Urban Design: Potentials and Opportunities

    • Edwin H. W. Chan, Sheila Conejos, Michael Wang
    Pages 75-88
  8. Toward Low Carbon Cities: The Chinese Experience

    • John A. Mathews, Mei-Chih Hu, Hao Tan
    Pages 89-98
  9. Low-Carbon Urban Infrastructure

    • Stephanie B. Ohshita, Nan Zhou
    Pages 99-111
  10. Low-Carbon Waste Management

    • Eugene Mohareb, Daniel Hoornweg
    Pages 113-127
  11. Social Factors Affecting Low-Carbon Cities

    • Viresh Patel
    Pages 145-155
  12. Key Drivers and Trends of Urban Greenhouse Gas Emissions

    • Abel Chavez, Joshua Sperling
    Pages 157-168
  13. Eco-Districts as a Transition Pathway to Low-Carbon Cities

    • Jennifer Lenhart, Joan Fitzgerald
    Pages 187-199
  14. Back Matter

    Pages 201-205

About this book

This book addresses key topics in the current deliberations and debates on low carbon cities that are underway globally. Contributions by experts from around the world focus on the key factors required for creating low carbon cities. These include appropriate infrastructure, ensuring co-benefits of climate actions, making best use of knowledge and information, proper accounting of emissions, and social factors such as behavioral change. Readers will gain a better understanding of these drivers and explore potential transformation pathways for cities.

Particular emphasis is given to the current situation of energy consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at the urban level, stressing the complexity of measuring GHG emissions from cities. Chapters also shed new light on the long-term transformation pathways towards low carbon. This book discusses key challenges and opportunities in all these domains to aid in creating low carbon cities, making it of value to policy makers, researchers in academia and consultants working on climate change and energy issues.

“The low carbon cities agenda is of bold ambition and demands rapid societal transformation. This book provides invaluable information and analysis on how the goals of this agenda can be achieved and what will be the significant obstacles in the way. The content in the book goes below the surface to reveal on-the-ground economic, engineering and equity issues that are at the heart of the Paris Climate Agreement and the ensuing policy debates. In this way, Creating Low Carbon Cities serves as a critical scholarly benchmark and as a toolkit for further action."

William Solecki, Professor, Institute for Sustainable Cities, City University of New York

"Creating Low Carbon Cities provides a refreshingly critical approach to low-carbon urban development, what has been achieved so far and the challenges ahead. It will be an important data-driven resource for local leaders, sustainability practitioners and urban planners.”

Ms. Monika Zimmermann, Deputy Secretary General, ICLEI—Local Governments for Sustainability

Editors and Affiliations

  • School of Environment, Resources and Development, and Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Change, Asian Institute of Technology, Pathumthani, Thailand

    Shobhakar Dhakal

  • School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, and Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston, USA

    Matthias Ruth

About the editors

Dr. Shobhakar Dhakal is an Associate Professor at School of Environment Resources and Development of the Asian Institute of Technology in Thailand. He, currently, heads its Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Change. His areas of expertize are in energy and climate policies, and cities and climate change and largely draws-on concepts from engineering, economics and environment and multidisciplinary in nature. He is also a visiting researcher of the National Institute for Environmental Studies Japan since 2012. Dr. Dhakal was one of the Coordinating Lead Authors for the Fifth Assessment Report of Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for the Working Group on Mitigation (for the Chapter ‘Human Settlements, Infrastructure and Spatial Planning’). He also currently a co-editor/leader of ongoing international Assessment Report on Climate Change and Cities.  He serves as a member of the scientific steering committee of the Global Carbon Project, a premier scientific program under the Future Earth. He was a guest research scholar of International Institute for Applied System Analysis in Austria for 2010-2013, served as a lead author for the Global Energy Assessment, principal scientific reviewer for UNEP’s GEO-5, member of the Consensus Panel on Low Carbon Cities of the Academy of Sciences of South Africa, member of the Cities Energy Modeling Group of the International Energy Agency, among others. He was founder editor and editor-in-chief of Carbon Management Journal (2010-2016) and currently an Associate Editor of Sustainable Cities and Society Journal.



Dr. Matthias Ruth is the Director of the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University. He also serves as the founding director of Northeastern’s Resilient Cities Laboratory and its Urban Informatics program. Professor Ruth holds a Masters degree in Economics from the University of Heidelberg, Germany and a PhD in Geography from the University of Illinois, where he also received training in engineering and biology. Prof. Ruth’s research focuses on dynamic modeling of natural resource use, industrial and infrastructure systems analysis, and environmental economics and policy. His theoretical work heavily draws on concepts from engineering, economics and ecology, while his applied research utilizes methods of non-linear dynamic modeling as well as adaptive and anticipatory management. Applications of his work cover the full spectrum from local to regional, to national and global environmental challenges, as well as the investment and policy opportunities these challenges present. Professor Ruth has published 14 books and over 120 papers and book chapters in the scientific literature. He is a founder of Ecological Economics, serves on the boards of numerous journals and scientific organizations, is a founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal Urban Climate, and collaborates extensively with scientists and policy makers worldwide. 

Bibliographic Information

Buy it now

Buying options

eBook USD 109.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book USD 139.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book USD 139.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access