Abstract
Progressive urbanization and urban activities have negative impacts on energy and material flows. In Shanghai, China, energy demand and natural resources input is increasing rapidly with fast growth of GDP and increase of population. In this paper, a quantitative model for urban metabolism was developed to evaluate the direct and indirect environmental impacts due to the energy and materials consumption in Shanghai, China. Also we estimated CO2 emission, Total Material Requirement (TMR) and Ecological Footprint (EF) for urban sustainability assessment based on the model. The results showed that the rapid economic growth and population increase in Shanghai by 2020 would cause 80 percent increases in TMR over 2004. In addition, we found that the indirect EF by construction materials production would become a large part of total EF in high urban growth period, but the indirect EF by electricity and food consumption would increase in the period of stable urban growth.
