Researches

Mounting evidence indicates that climate tipping points can have large, potentially irreversible, impacts on the earth system and human societies. Yet, climate change metrics applied in current sustainability assessment methods generally do not consider these tipping points, with the use of arbitrarily determined time horizons and assumptions that the climate impact of a product or service is independent of emission timing. Here, we propose a new method for calculating climate tipping characterization factors for greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide) at midpoint. It covers 13 projected tipping points, incorporates the effect that the crossing of a given tipping point has on accelerating the crossing of other tipping points, and addresses uncertainties in the temperature thresholds that trigger the tipping points. To demonstrate the added value of the new metric, we apply it to emissions stemming from end-of-life of plastic polymers and compare them with commonly used metrics. This highlights the need to consider climate tipping in sustainability assessment of products and services.

Historical areas should be protected as a part of cultural heritage, buildings should be kept alive by preserving their original textures and transferred to future generations. Since reuse is considered an integral part of conservation, it is very important to preserve the social and cultural characteristics of the building. Indicators; It is a communication tool that technology provides us. The new function given to the buildings in order to preserve and keep alive the vitality of the historical buildings is generally the space that provides an environment for mutual communication between individuals. It is important to reshape the building in a way that preserves its traditional position, composition and balance without disturbing its connection with the environment. However, while doing this, the harmony of the new concept and the building may not overlap. The incompatibility of some unchangeable equipment of the historical building or the materials belonging to the period and today's contemporary preferences can create a handicap. In this research, two sample buildings are used to test how modern and dynamic display concepts can be combined with historical buildings. For this reason, the Tate Modern and Orsay Museum examples were chosen because they are similar in scale and have been recently renovated.

Life cycle assessments (LCA) are increasingly used by industry to communicate improvements of environmental performance in a scientifically defendable way. Typically, studies compare new product designs with “last year’s model” or a market reference to document that the eco-efficiency of a company’s product portfolio is gradually improving or to show that the company is ahead of its competitors in terms of eco-efficiency performance. In both cases the signal to stakeholders is that companies are doing “their share” to foster sustainability. However, while the environmental performance of individual products is being improved, humanity is generally moving further away from a state of environmental sustainability. (1) The reason for this seeming contradiction is that improvements in eco-efficiency are insufficient to offset increasing levels of consumption. For example, PricewaterhouseCoopers calculated that the global eco-efficiency improvement from 2000 to 2013 with respect to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of 0.9% per year needs to increase to 6.2% per year and remain at that level until the year 2100 for emission volumes to be aligned with IPCC’s RCP2.6 scenario. In other words, the recent decarbonization rate of the global economy must increase by a factor of 7 to avoid exceeding a global temperature increase of 2 °C. (2) How can the current LCA practice of assessing environmental performance relative to a reference product be improved to support decisions on the path to environmental sustainability? How can we ensure that LCA is not used to legitimize a business as usual situation of incremental and insufficient eco-efficiency improvements?