Carbon Accounting

Carbon accounting creates a competitive advantage for companies; henceforth, policymakers in companies and institutions nowadays are relying on carbon accounting to take decisions regarding climate change and environmental conservation. The development of carbon accounting would add economic value to companies and public institutions. The importance of this study is to demonstrate the significance of carbon accounting and how it relates to climate risk management. Besides, this study shows the impact of carbon accounting disclosure on raising the awareness of investors.

Buildings are the main cause for global CO2 emissions (USGB, 2008). Almost half of their lifetime emissions are caused during the production process of the utilized building materials and the transportation to the construction site – so called grey or embodied energy (Adams, 2006). This paper adds an ecological point for the use of load-bearing walls. It demonstrates that bearing walls ought to become the preferred construction method, particularly for residential buildings of one to three stories, as this technique renders superior ecological qualities, i.e. saving CO2 emissions, and facilitate financial advantages, while also improving the thermal comfort within the building. The Egyptian construction industry relies heavily on the method of skeleton construction: a frame of reinforced concrete provides stability and carrying capacity to the building and is filled with simple bricks and mortar. This technique has become the predominant way of constructing buildings taller than a few floors, although an abundance of historic examples proves the lasting qualities of bearing walls 1. Undoubtedly, skeleton construction is very adaptable and enables easy extensions upwards. Yet, also small houses with merely one or two stories (detached or row houses) are increasingly constructed in this very energy intensive way. A two-story family home on average produces 438 tons of CO2. 92% are caused by the reinforced concrete (a steel-based construction element) in the structural slabs, beams, and foundations of which 73% are accounted by the concrete and only 8% by the bricks. Shifting the construction of smaller buildings to the method of bearing walls can dramatically reduce the emissions per home to 183 tons of CO2. This technique relies on masoned walls that carry slabs for the ceiling. Construction costs are reduced by saving expensive steel. The thick brick walls improve the building shell, thereby lowering the energy demand for cooling and airconditioning systems. This paper demonstrates the possible reductions of building related prime energy consumption and carbon emissions through a shift in construction standards towards load-bearing walls. It shows also that economic feasibility is given due to reductions in construction and operation costs. Despite these financial incentives, a wide behavioral change has not yet taken place within the Egyptian society, implying that additional (social, cultural and political) factors need to be considered as well. This paper therefore offers feasible suggestions, which take into account the prevailing impediments, to encourage a switch in the Egyptian building sector to the bearing wall method and to address changes in the population's user behavior.

This paper proposes a makeshift approach to carbon accounting in Egyptian towns, which takes into account the limited resources of local municipalities and the widespread lack of available data. Egypt is highly vulnerable to climate change. Escalating temperatures, water scarcity, and rising sea levels threaten all parts of society. Cities absorb a growing portion of the increasing population and are especially exposed to the precarious effects of global warming. Consequently, there is an emergent need for mitigation and adaptation measures in urban areas, which presuppose an adequate accounting of the local greenhouse gas emissions. This paper suggest a series of six steps that can be followed by municipal decision makers to estimate their emissions by collecting existing information on site and utilizing systematic approximations to make up for missing statistics.

Prinsloo, G.J., Dobson, R.T. and Schreve, K. 2014. Carbon Footprint Optimization as PLC Control Strategy in Solar Power System Automation. Energy Procedia 49(1). p 2180–2190. doi: 10.1016/j.egypro.2014.03.231
Control and automation forms an integral part in the design of solar power conversion systems for stand-alone village installations as well as for industrial scale grid-connected installations. Some control designs employ digital implementation platforms such as robust industrial standard Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC's) with remote control/access capabilities. The Siemens Simatic S7-1214C TIA platform was chosen as PLC platform to automate an easy-to-assemble stand-alone mechatronic solar concentrator platform for power generation in rural Africa. This paper describes issues around a CO2 impact optimization algorithm as control concept for the automation of the solar power generation and tracking system wherein a digital power budget principle forms the basis for artificially intelligent decision architecture to maximize CO2 impact of the solar power system. The proposed control strategy would be of value to both off-grid rural power generation systems and commercial solar farms where CO2 impact optimization eventually impacts directly on the carbon footprint of a solar farm. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).