Green City and Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions: An Application of Integrated Economic-Environmental Model for the Buffalo-Niagara Metropolitan Region.

摘要

Under the global efforts of mitigating climate change, the need for an effective method to measure the greenhouse gas (GHG) emission on a region is critical. At the same time, there is a critical potential to turn the Rust Belt into revitalized cities by making the city greener. It requires careful and thorough analysis on current economic structure and trend related with GHG emission to make a successful transformation into green cities in the Buffalo-Niagara metropolitan region. It is a challenge how to develop a systematic method which estimates the GHG emissions for local regions, because it requires applying advanced methodologies and models, utilizing well-established national and/or international collaborative efforts and validating model accuracy. This study is to measure the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with the current economic activities in Buffalo-Niagara region and to simulate the change of GHG emissions in terms of economic pattern analysis associate with green city. The basic economic model starts from the Buffalo-Niagara's Inter-Zip code Input-Output (BIZIO) model. The BIZIO can be developed to Environmental Buffalo-Niagara's Inter-Zip code Input-Output Model (EBIZIO) which designed to estimate the GHG emission of Buffalo-Niagara metropolitan area. Once the model is ready, this study expects to estimate the GHG emission by zip code specifically based on the founded relationships between industry's outputs and GHG emission inventories. Furthermore, GHG emissions will be estimated as a pattern analysis for being green city with an application of the cost-effective analysis for the Buffalo-Niagara metropolitan region. This study can contribute to advancing a transportation and environmental research and to simulating the plans for planning and policy concerns in this region.