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Keywords: resource efficiency, urban planning, sustainable development, smart cities
ABSTRACT
Addressing the threats of climate change has become a key issue in urban development. Striving towards energy self-sufficiency, implementing regional resource cycles, retrofitting of the built environment, turning energy consumption towards renewables as well as generally decoupling urban development from energy consumption are crucial for a city's future vulnerability and resilience against changes in general resource availability. The challenge gets further complex, as resource and energy efficiency in a city is deeply interwoven with other aspects of urban development such as social structures and the geographical context. As cities are the main consumer of energy and resources, they are both problem and solution to tackle issues of energy efficiency and saving. Cities have been committed to this agenda, especially to meet the national and international energy targets. Increasingly, cities act as entrepreneurs of new energy solutions acknowledging that efficient monitoring of energy and climate policies has become important to urban branding and competitiveness. This special issue presents findings from the European FP7 project 'Planning for Energy Efficient Cities' (PLEEC) and related research.
We are grateful for the invitiation of the editors of the Journal of Settlements and Spatial Planning to edit a special issue on 'Planning for Resource Efficient Cities'. Resource efficiency is ranked high on the political agenda, especially in the light of climate change. Just a few months ago, in December 2015, all of the 195 member states of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) adopted the Paris Agreement, promising to reduce their carbon output to keep global warming well below 2°C. Key strategies to this are also reflected in EU's 20-20-20 targets, of jointly increasing energy efficiency, reducing CO2 emissions and increasing the share of renewable energy sources.
Despite the international and national frameworks, regions and cities play a crucial role to put such ambitions into practice. The major part of energy and resource consumption takes place in the cities. Futhermore, the demand of urban citizens for goods and services typically involves a large hinterland and causes resource use in other places. Many projects and organisations around the world are currently working on making our cities more resource efficient. Most recently, the European Environment Agency has published three...