Sustainability with Geodesign

 GDS LATAM  -  Geodesign  -  Development  -  Citizens participation 

Sustainability seeks to protect our natural environment, human and ecological health, while promoting innovation without compromising our current or future way of life.

Sustainability is a concept that tries to unite the social sciences, civil engineering and environmental sciences with advanced technologies for analyzing the impact of developments and establish measures that allow maintaining the ecological balance, stability and resilience of the landscape and its communities. When we hear the word “sustainability” we tend to think of renewable fuel sources, reducing carbon emissions, protecting environments and a way of keeping the delicate ecosystems of our planet in balance. In short, sustainability looks to protect our natural environment, human and ecological health, while driving innovation and not compromising our way of life. See how GeoPlanner and Site Analysis are used to achieve this goal.

The definition of “sustainability” is the study of how natural systems function, remain diverse and produce everything it needs for the ecology to remain in balance. It also acknowledges that human civilization takes resources to sustain our modern way of life. There are countless examples throughout human history where a civilization has damaged its own environment and seriously affected its own survival

Sustainability and sustainable development focus on balancing that fine line between competing needs - our need to move forward technologically and economically, and the needs to protect the environments in which we and others live. Sustainability is not just about the environment, it's also about our health as a society in ensuring that no people or areas of life suffer as a result of environmental site planning, and it's also about examining the long term effects of the actions humanity takes and asking questions about how it may be improved.

Developing a sustainable Future

It is not yet clear what our sustainable future will look like but with emerging technologies and the improvement of older cleaner fuel sources, many people now look to a post fossil fuel world - including businesses. Since the 1950s, we have experienced unprecedented growth including intensive farming, a technological revolution and a massive increase in our power needs putting even greater pressure and strain on the planet's resources. We are also far more aware of the plight of the developing world and that facing our planet as we now observe both natural and human-caused disasters and the effects that these can have on the ecosystems and on human population. It's vital that we develop new, cleaner technologies to cope with our energy demands but sustainability is not just about the environment.

It also concerns the need to diminish the use of energy when stablishing human activities, infrastructures and equipment for Urban Settlements.

Decrease Energy Consumption.

According to the European Union, the construction sector consumes 40% of primary energy and 50% of raw materials. It generates 30% of waste and spends more than 20% of drinking water. As a society, we must take on the challenge of adjusting to community regulations and fulfilling the commitments acquired in terms of reducing energy consumption, reducing carbon dioxide emissions and the necessary control of the dispersion and separation of human activities in the territory, what causes the greater consumption of non-renewable fuels in history, the daily transfer of work to housing, commerce, school, health center and recreation. The Land Use Model practiced by almost all urban planners worldwide for more than 100 years, where land uses are reserved for specific activities like, residential, commercial, industrial, education, health and recreation are the main cause of urban dispersion and the unstoppable race to build more highways to facilitate the circulation of vehicles among these land uses with personal automobiles that have primarily combustion engines.

The progressive decrease in CO2 emissions in buildings and transportations means are among the priority objectives of the main global organizations to achieve decarbonization of the economy by 2050. To achieve this, the so-called Climate and Energy Framework for 2030 sets three key objectives of face to that date. The first is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40%. The second is to ensure that renewables reach a minimum share of 32% in final energy consumption. The third seeks to improve energy efficiency by 32%. If these goals are to be achieved, the participation of the construction sector in the development of Smart Cities is crucial.

Develop Smart Cities

 In its Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) number 11, the United Nations also poses the challenge of "making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable." The organization emphasizes that "the cities of the world occupy only 2% of the planet, but represent between 60% and 80% of energy consumption, and 75% of carbon emissions." According to the UN, "by 2030, almost 60% of the world's population will live in urban areas." Hence, "substantially increase the number of cities and human settlements that adopt and implement integrated policies and plans to promote inclusion, efficient use of resources, mitigation of climate change and adaptation to it." Of the 30 specific objectives posed by the document, one of them intends to transform the real estate park into one “with high energy efficiency and decarbonized before 2050, facilitating the economically profitable transformation of existing buildings into almost energy-efficient buildings null".

Define a climate strategy

Energy neutrality in real estate is derived from Directive 2010/31 / EU on efficiency in the building sector. In theory, by this year 2019 all public buildings should have observed almost zero energy consumption. And as of December 31, 2020, the obligation should extend to all homes built in the rest of the EU. However, the Technical Building Code has not yet incorporated the definition of what is an almost null building.

In the achievement of a climate-neutral building, very different factors are involved. It involves improving the thermal envelope with insulation methods, incorporating renewable energy generation or use systems, procedures to reduce lighting consumption or implement effective installations for the supply of hot water and heating, among others. To all this we must add "the implementation of measures for the circular economy and industrialization of the building sector."

Improve the actual city buildings and infrastructures

Sources in the construction industry sector point to two important data in this search for efficiency: 90% of the housing stock was erected prior to the entry into force of the Technical Building Code, approved in 2006. And 60% of the Real estate was built without thermal insulation, since no regulations existed then on energy efficiency. For this reason, efforts to improve must be extreme and many of them have to take the form of rehabilitations.

Planning for Sustainability.

At GDS Latam we have developed several procedures to develop Sustainability Plans for urban spaces. First we begin by Analyzing the Site, and discover its environmental behavior by combining the levels of capacities that every environmental layer of natural variables (Soils, Geology, Geomorphology, Vegetation and others) show in terms of degree of acceptance or rejection to any particular human activities (Residential, industrial, commercial, etc.) That overlay is transformed into capability maps, and using additional information like proximity to other services and activities we can map the combined feasibility for a human activity to take comfortable and sustainable place at a particular site.

Site analysis is then a process to discover the best place to accommodate human activities, ensuring some ecological and sustainable environmental level of coexistence.

GIS has proven to be the best way to handle and analyze the multiple set of environmental and social economic variables to screen and locate the best Site for accommodating human activities.

Esri has developed extensions to ArcGIS, applications and programmed solutions that help to build models for evaluating the Urban and Landscape territory and allow to accelerate the evaluation processes.

See: Spatial Analyst and GeoPlanner

Prepared by  RICARDO CUBEROS MEJÍA  for GDS Latam Group and Esri Venezuela - 2019 (2021 Update).