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Developing new decision-making tools to promote the sustainable development in european cities based on eco-industrial park strategy

Deliverables

The Ecopadev project was focused on developing decision-making tools for local authorities to improve town planning and local living conditions. UNINOVA is the responsible for the contributions related with the Human resources, Quality of Life and Community Connections contents of the Ecopadev tool. These issues are a very important component to perform the Ecopadev Park's evaluation. These subjects are newly-added domains in Industrial Ecology and are one of the most innovative domains.
Within the tool, the topic relating to Energy contains a number of question that deal with subjects such as energy strategy, energy targets and energy consumption. The parks progress on the way towards sustainability is marked by the calculation of a number of indicators as well as the calculation of a general score on the topic of ‘Sustainable Building and Energy’. The main purpose is to make the user of the tool aware of energy consumption and possible improvements, for which a number of so called improvement suggestions are suggested, especially in areas where the parks performance is weak. Use of the tool is not limited to a unique effort. Repeated use of the tool following implementation of improvement suggestions will guide the user further and deeper into the tool, presenting further and more advanced possibilities to improve performance with respect to energy consumption and to make further progress on the road towards a true ecoindustrial park. Knowledge on and experience with energy consumption and possibilities for energy saving measures was used to build an instrument that can help users of the tool to substantially reduce energy consumption and therefore energy cost. In the current project, the application is tailored to eco-industrial parks, but it can be made to apply to any stationary consumer of energy, i.e. energy from transportation is not included. In addition to reducing energy consumption of buildings and therefore of energy costs, energy saving techniques usually have a positive effect on comfort for the tenants, increasing productivity and decreasing absence due to sickness.
The Ecopadev web-based tool for decision-making usable at internet to support local authorities to promote sustainable development in technology parks and in their networks nationally and globally, and promote sustainable development in industrial areas as well as among individual companies: The main objective of this tool is to provide a guide for Local Authorities to improve urban governance and decision-making through the Eco-Industrial Park approach, as a mean to achieve sustainable development. The decision making tool has been developed focusing on Local Authorities as main users, but it is also possible for Park Management Organisations to use the tool for their own individual improvement. The Ecopadev web based tool combines two elements: - The evaluation methodology, which is focused on gathering data for evaluating the situation of the Park towards sustainability. - A set of indicators for quantifying the evolution of the quality urban life including the survey of the achievements obtained through the implementation of the improvement suggestions provided by the evaluation method. The special structure of the Ecopadev web based tool enables providing a questionnaire appropriated to the data availability of each user, and improvement suggestions suitable for the situation of the park. This step-by-step approach is one of the main differences presented by the ECOPADEV decision making tool. The result of the use of the tool is the improvement of economic performance of companies while minimising the environmental and social impacts.
This result comprises all the software source code developed to implement the ECOPADEV web-based tool. This code can be split up in three main parts: - The user interface code, which covers all the web pages that are shown to the user. - The processing code, which deals with all the operations needed to carry out the decision-making process. - The data base code, which includes the operations related to the data and the management of the databases. This source code is essential to guarantee the maintenance of the tool, to fix possible errors or to build up new versions of the tool.
Deliverables resulting from the project compile relevant information about: - Case studies regarding Eco-Industrial concept application. - Description of the developed decision-making tool. - Application procedures and experiences regarding the use of the decision-making tool. - Dissemination actions and exploitation plans. - Description of Eco-Parks Management Structures and conflicts of interests. Therefore Deliverables are considered a key information source about all the aspects considered during the developement of the decision-making tool. The list of the deliverables is: - Current Situation of Industrial Parks Management in Europe. - Comparative results between experiences in Europe. - List of existing Local Authorities procedures to improve the quality of urban areas and information gaps. - Evaluation methodologies for obtaining baseline data. - List of indicators for decision-making. - Eco-Park Management Structure. - Description of extra-net systems. - Baseline data comparative report. - List of selected specific indicators and its evolution. - Quantified improvements in environmental, social and economic aspects. - Decision tools description. Application procedures and limitations. - Exploitation and Dissemination Strategy and Plans. - List of specific diffusion events. - List of criteria of management project success. - A consensus proposal of procedures to solve “conflicts of interest”.
The main elements of this result are: - Questionnaire for data gathering: The information about the park studied is obtained by an interactive set of questions that covers all aspects and issues regarding the following domains: limits and targets; pollution prevention; waste; wastewater; air emissions; noise; risk assessment; biodiversity; materials and production processes. - Weighting procedure: The weighting procedure considers elements regarding the activities of a management structure towards the improvement of the considered aspects as well as performance (quantitative) data. The assessment method combines the parameters in order to measure data. - Indicators: Indicators are calculated from the answers given by the user to the above mentioned questionnaire. They have been selected with the aim of assessing relevant aspects of this topic. - Improvement suggestions: relevant recommendations for improving the situation in the park are provided. - Default values: in specific cases average values will be provided, in order to enable the user to get some more information out of general situations. - Glossary of terms: glossary for clarification of technical terms is provided. - Local reference system: it allows the user inserting own values, objectives and targets regarding the aspects reflected in that section.
EUR is responsible for the contributions related to transport issues. Transportation is a ‘blind spot’ in the context of studying business parks. There is no disagreement about the relevance, but the problem with transportation is that everyone is concerned about the negative aspects (congestion, noise, etc.), but economic activities and dynamics are dependent on a well performing transport system. So here is a trade-off. Furthermore transportation is the effect of a derived demand and the source/motive is mostly outside the park. EUR tries to make these relationships and complexes explicit and they are now incorporated in the decision support system in a balances way. Besides this ‘analytical’ element, the Ecopadev project also provides a set of practical recommendations how to improve the transport performance. A separation is made between commuter transport, business transport and freight transport. As such the contribution in the project starts with the relevance of awareness raising, but it is also presented a domain where concrete action can be undertaken. Based on research experiences in this domain it can be stated that this balanced and integrated approach is innovative and it adds new insides to the theories on urban development and industrial ecology.
The results from the work of KTH in the project is related to both the methodology and the specific topic areas that KTH and the subcontractor of KTH (Ingenieurburo Trinius) developed for the ECOPADEV tool. Output from the project as a whole are both related to empirical results from the technology parks participating in the project (practical experiences) and to advances of theory and research methods. The dissemination activities, including national and international conferences and journals, carried out in the project were expected to enhance knowledge both with regards to theory and empirical results from studies of environmental policy integration in technology parks. The focus area of KTH was concerned with “sustainable marketing” while KTH subcontracted Ingenieurburo Trinius, Hamburg Germany, for involvement on the development of the subject “sustainable building”. Building related issues were one of the thematic fields to be covered by the tool developed within the Ecopadev project. The subcontractor contributed significantly to the set up of the methodology applied in the tool, throughout all thematic sections. Mainly, the contribution to the methodology development was related to the translation of the general evaluation concept into a structured method and an applicable concept for reference-comparison-based assessments and dynamic weighting procedures. The work on the methodology was carried out in close cooperation with GAIKER. Due to the significant and very tight linkage of the thematic fields on building and energy, these two thematic fields of the tool were eventually merged together. The section on sustainable building and energy was thereby developed in close cooperation also with ECN. The main result of the subcontract is the technical content of the section on energy and sustainable building.

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