- A framework to take into account of CO2 restrictions on municipal urban planning    122 kb by    Mourão, Joana & Cuchí, Albert & Pagés, Anna | jmourao@lnec.pt    Short Outline 2 x 20% till 2020 is the slogan of the recent Covenant of European Mayors, which commits municipalities to reduce CO2 emissions locally, through the planning and management of territories and cities. This paper discusses how to turn this into practice. Abstract According to the recently signed covenant of mayors, more than 480 European cities are committed to reduce their CO2 emissions on 20% till 2020. This commitment, which is about finding paths to sustainability, has great implications over municipal urban planning, and it demands the assumption of new objectives and the use of appropriate tools for city planning and management. Most of the several environmental evaluation tools available are not at all suitable to CO2 evaluation on municipal urban planning. Facing the objective of reducing CO2 emissions on 20% through the management of urban systems implies to share it out through three main sectors: buildings, mobility and urban services (water and waste). To allocate quantitative reductions to these sectors and to verify the progress on such objectives is fundamental to accomplish the commitment, however it is not clear how municipalities should make this distribution, neither how to verify it till 2020. A framework is needed to respond to such commitment through the main scales of planning: diagnosis, objectives, actions and monitoring; and through the main sectors of urban planning: housing, transport and urban services. For the diagnosis and monitoring there are tools available to measure and estimate emissions, still is not clear which emissions should be considered of a municipality, given that that many emissions are inter-municipal (mobility) or supra-municipal (energy). On what concerns to definition of objectives, a direct relation with the diagnosis and monitoring tools should be assured, in search of a coherent framework for the integration of CO2 restrictions on municipal urban planning. This paper, based on a research developed by the authors to the Generalitat de Catalunya’s office of environmental assessment, discusses how to define the emissions from the responsibility of a municipality and how to share out the commitment of 20% of CO2 emissions reduction between the three main groups of urban infra-structure: buildings, transports and urban services. Keywords Environmental Assessment; Sustainable urban planning; Covennat of mayors for 2020; CO2 emissions Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2009: Low Carbon Cities   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper