Environmental issues

Résumé

Environmental issues are disruptions in the usual function of ecosystems. Further, these issues can be caused by humans (human impact on the environment) or they can be natural. These issues are considered serious when the ecosystem cannot recover in the present situation, and catastrophic if the ecosystem is projected to certainly collapse. Environmental protection is the practice of protecting the natural environment on the individual, organizational or governmental levels, for the benefit of both the environment and humans. Environmentalism is a social and environmental movement that addresses environmental issues through advocacy, legislation education, and activism. Environment destruction caused by humans is a global, ongoing problem. Water pollution also cause problems to marine life. Most scholars think that the project peak global world population of between 9-10 billion people, could live sustainably within the earth's ecosystems if human society worked to live sustainab

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_issues

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Towards sufficiency in housing: Agent-based model and transition scenarios

Margarita Agriantoni

Research problem: Housing is responsible for a considerable part of global resource consumption. In Switzerland, it accounts for almost one third of the country's CO2 emissions and half of the total energy demand. Thus, housing plays an important role in the transition to sustainable development. Housing has been thoroughly studied from a disciplinary perspective, e.g., economics, social sciences, psychology, engineering. However, little attention has been paid to housing as a system of interrelated actors, e.g., developers, owners, tenants and state, whose actions might be described by different disciplines. Aim: The aim of this thesis is to investigate how a change in the construction practices of property owners in combination to a more space-efficient allocation of dwellings to households and a behavioural change of tenants can achieve a substantial reduction in the environmental impact of housing. This dissertation focuses on the interrelations of housing actors, concentrating mainly on the property owners and explores which measures and to what extent can lead to a reduction of space consumption of housing.Methods: Housing is characterised by a high level of complexity, therefore a transdisciplinary approach is adopted. Firstly, the Swiss housing market and its unique attributes are studied. However, in this thesis, we study a subset of the Swiss rental housing market; it comprises two housing cooperatives: ABZ in Zurich and SCHL in Lausanne as well as the insurer and asset manager Swiss Mobiliar. Their housing stocks, of approximately 10,000 dwellings, are examined in depth and are used as a case study. Extensive data gathering allowed to create an exhaustive inventory of the building stock of the three property owners. The data on tenants was limited, thus, we conducted a tenant survey. Furthermore, a series of workshops with both tenants and property owners were organised to study their decision-making processes. A bottom-up agent-based model (ABM) is built, which portrays the case study housing system. The main actors of the rental housing market (property owners and households) are represented in the model by agents; the owner agents make decisions about their building stock and tenants, while the household agents choose a dwelling based on their needs and housing preferences. The dynamic evolution of both owners and households and the interaction between them is simulated in the model and allows the study of emergent phenomena. The present thesis attempts the assessment of the environmental impact of housing through the lens of housing sufficiency. Space consumption, in terms of dwelling surface and floor area per capita, is considered as the largest determinant of resource consumption.Results: The simulation results show that measures taken to decrease the environmental impact of housing and space consumption are inadequate if owners do not change their construction practices and households do not actively change their housing behaviour. Most measures explored in this thesis, if implemented individually, succeed in reducing the rate of increase in space consumption but fail to reverse the upward trend. A more space-efficient allocation of dwellings to households proves to have a certain effect. However, only when combined with other measures, such as the densification of the existing building stock and a change in construction practices, a significant decrease of environmental impact is observed.

EPFL2022

Chargement

The building cultures of regions where plant resources abound show the adaptation of these local bio-based materials to the roofing of buildings: thatch, reed, bark or shingles. Despite a low environmental impact, these techniques require skilled manual work and remain unused compared to mainstream industrialised solutions based on terracotta, metal sheets or bituminous products. The emergence of digital tools capable of appreciating and manipulating objects with variable characteristics creates an opportunity for developing partially automated construction techniques by capitalising on pre-existing know-how. In particular, a type of wood shingle known as tavillon in Romandy, Switzerland is the primary object of this study. The objective is to describe and validate an entire construction scenario based on automation tools. The research plan paving the way for scenario implementation is another deliverable. We first carry out a state of the art of traditional tavillon technique before translating those rules into an algorithm. This instruction set is implemented in a parametric geometric model to design such roofs. Towards automation, the geometrical variability of the shingles makes it necessary to specify the model to these individual variations. A field study then demonstrates benefits from the automated installation are secured when framed into an industrial context, leading to the investigation of a panel-based prefabrication scenario.

2021

Chargement

This Master thesis is meant to be the first step toward working to quantify the environmental impacts of Swiss cleantech industry when implemented abroad and how this knowledge can help frame new policy approaches to foster this important industry. The reduction of environmental impacts and the resulting net positive externalities are currently primarily attributed to the implementer with little consideration given to the innovator. If rewarding the upstream chain based on downstream environmental benefits would help the industry flourish, how could this be achieved? How should the environmental benefits be allocated throughout the innovation chain? These questions will be explored in this thesis.

2018

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Towards sufficiency in housing: Agent-based model and transition scenarios

Margarita Agriantoni

EPFL2022