“The tool provides a nice intersection of sustainability and equity,” said Eric Wojchik, a planning analyst with the Met Council. “Co-producing a project of this magnitude through virtual collaboration and discussion is really quite unique, and opens up new ways to scale up co-production,” said Ramaswami. Such co-production was particularly remarkable because Ramaswami’s team, the Met Council team, and various city and university partners ended up conducting online deliberations on zero-carbon pathways due to COVID-19 restrictions on in-person meetings. This particular co-production project was unique because it involved collaboration to inform models for 182 different cities and towns in the metropolitan region, who were engaged in an innovative way through the Met Council’s senior researchers Mauricio Leon and Baris Gumus-Dawes. Co-production is gaining attention as an important research method to create actionable science by engaging the users and producers of knowledge in collaborative discovery. Ramaswami’s team collaborated with the Met Council through a knowledge co-production process between researchers and practitioners that has been advanced by Ramaswami’s work with cities since 2010. The team worked against the backdrop of Princeton’s larger Net-Zero America Project, which modeled power grid transitions across the US, enabling Ramaswami’s team to focus more deeply on urban-scale processes that need to be integrated with larger-scale decarbonization models. Her Princeton team included Kangkang “KK” Tong, a postdoctoral research associate in CEE who is now an assistant professor at the China-UK Low Carbon College, Shanghai Jiao Tong University Bhartendu Pandey, a postdoctoral researcher in CEE and the Lead Urban Data Scientist in Ramaswami’s Urban Nexus Lab and Roshan Shankar and Jinjin Chen, graduate students in CEE. “This is the first project to quantify each community’s energy use projections, based on granular data on each town’s own building stock, its own energy intensity and its own employment characteristics,” said Ramaswami. They then took it a step farther by partnering with the Twin Cities Metropolitan Council (Met Council) in Minnesota, incorporating high-resolution local data to create a “Greenhouse Gas Scenario Planning Tool” ( currently in beta testing) for every city, town and rural community in the Minneapolis-St. To that end, Ramaswami and her team have developed the Zero Emissions Calculator for Communities (ZECC), a carbon dioxide emissions calculator. Cities that emit no more greenhouse gases than are permanently removed are essential to averting the worst consequences of climate change, say experts. Ramaswami is working to help these cities reach carbon “ net-zero ,” sometimes called “carbon neutrality,” balancing the amount of carbon dioxide emitted with the amount absorbed from the atmosphere. “If you can figure out zero-carbon strategies at the city scale for different types of cities across the globe, there’s potential to solve global challenges with local benefits.”Īt a UN climate summit last fall, 1,049 cities with a collective 722 million occupants joined the “Cities Race to Zero” campaign, committing to halve emissions by 2030 and reach net-zero by 2050 or earlier, which was the largest and most aggressive set of commitments by any group at the summit. “About 55% of the world’s population lives in cities, and more than 90% of the world’s gross domestic product is generated in cities,” she said. “In cities, environment health and human wellbeing intersect,” said Anu Ramaswami, who developed the tool and is Princeton University’s Sanjay Swani ’87 Professor of India Studies and a professor in three other programs - the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, and the High Meadows Environmental Institute - as well as the director of the M. To get to net-zero carbon dioxide emissions, what actions should cities prioritize?Ī new tool for city planners helps them design a portfolio of actions that encompasses compact development, smart electric mobility, electric heating systems, mass timber construction, urban reforestation, and technologies that allow resources to circulate efficiently through the food, waste and energy sectors.
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