4M – ARCC

Professor Kevin Lomas

The research focuses on the city of Leicester:

Domestic Buildings: Investigating the nature of energy use and carbon emissions in homes
Non-domestic buildings: These include the city’s offices, schools, factories and shops
Transport: Looking at options for more environmentally-friendly options for transport
Biological sequestration: A study of gardens, parks and other green spaces and how these can be managed to ‘lock in’ CO₂.

The project will calculate the carbon footprint of Leicester by:

measuring the carbon released by traffic and the burning of fossil fuels and the rate at which vegetation captures carbon and lock it in the soil
modelling the effects on carbon budget of road layouts, traffic volumes and traffic speeds, the way we use energy in our buildings and the way we look after green spaces
mapping the sources and sinks of carbon for the whole city and comparing this with the social and economic well-being of its inhabitants
management studies to investigate how to shrink the city’s carbon footprint.

The work will:

provide a methodology, data sources, models, data collection techniques, analysis methods and validation approaches that can use to benchmark and manage the carbon sources and sinks in any UK city; and
produce ways of representing carbon sources and sinks in a form suitable for visualisation and interpretation by policy makers, local authorities and the general public.