Defining ecological ceiling impact areas

This section presents strategies for moving the urban development sector towards regenerative practice to restore climate stability and healthy ecosystems. We bundled these strategies into 48 ecological impact areas.

For each ecological impact areas, we considered where an actor has agency to affect change, both locally and globally, drawing on the ‘Doughnut Unrolled’ methodology.

The ecological lenses are understood in terms of local aspirations and global responsibilities, asking:

The local-ecological lens: How can this development restore and be inspired by its surrounding Nature?

The global-ecological lens: How can this development respect the health of the whole planet?

Ecological impact areas aim to collectively cover the full life cycle, one step at a time, losing no sight of off-site impacts. This includes the acquisition of a land plot, extraction of raw materials, manufacturing of products, construction, operational and end of life phases. Indicators, tools, and benchmarks associated with these impact areas can be found in the ‘Doughnut for Urban Development Database.’

The ecological impact areas are mapped onto the broad categories of climate stability and healthy ecosystems, which underpin the dynamics of the Holocene-like Earth system. This approach implicitly accounts for the fact that all nine planetary boundaries interact with each other. Refraining from rigid categorisation stems from the fact that all nine planetary boundaries interact with each other, and many planetary impact areas can be associated with several different boundaries simultaneously (Figure 18 and Figure 19).

Identifying Ecological Ceiling Impacts Areas

The selection of the Ecological Ceiling Impacts Areas was developed through three integrated work streams:

• “Down-scaling” and translating the planetary boundaries from global level to urban development scale using allocation principles and Life Cycle Assessment, as detailed in Chapter 4.

• Mapping and analysis of existing frameworks and best practices such as SDGs, global impact management frameworks, urban development specific frameworks such as DGNB, LEED and BREEAM, and Biodiversity Net Gain - local and regional legislation, and Doughnut Economic Action Lab’s ‘Data Portrait of a Place’ tool.

• Three multidisciplinary workshops with a broad group of actors in urban development, involving researchers, engineers, architects, developers, ecologists and human rights experts.

Through such a process, the Doughnut for Urban Development aims to provide a holistic guide that reflects the planetary impacts of urban development and their complex interconnections. We invite the wider urban development community to join us in cocreating future iterations of the Doughnut for Urban Development framework together, following the opensource philosophy, by adding new tools, indicators, methods, benchmarks, and sharing examples of best practices. We wish for the framework to evolve with time and reflect the needs of the planet and the diversity of its residents.

Organising impact areas by climate stability and healthy ecosystems

Climate Stability

Climate stability is threatened by the high concentration of carbon and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Every local emission, no matter how small, leads to global consequences. Every one of them counts because carbon accumulates and remains in the atmosphere for a long time, between 300 and 1000 years (Buis, 2019).

Currently, urban development is responsible for an unsustainable, large amount of carbon emissions that are distributed along the entire supply chain and across the lifespan of a building. These phases include the choice of raw materials, its extraction and processing, transportation, construction, maintenance, usage and end of life phase. Each phase offers opportunities for minimising carbon footprint and therefore represents a distinct planetary impact area, which can be enacted by choosing re-used, recycled or low-carbon materials, balancing between on-site and off-site processing, reducing waste, avoiding demolition by retrofitting, building renewable energy capacity, increasing overall durability – and much more.

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a well-established tool that can reveal the sources of major contributions of carbon footprints and therefore guide the most important reduction interventions. In addition to carbon, urban development activity also emits and uses other undesirable entities such as pollutants, particulates, nutrients, plastics and more which need to be as seriously treated as carbon footprint.

Healthy Ecosystems

Ecosystems stabilise the global climate. However, unlike for climate, there is not a single variable that could measure and fully represent the quality of well-functioning ecosystems, nor a simple way to link the global and local scales. Ecosystems are inherently different to climate. They depend on the combination of highly bio-diverse life, appropriate climate conditions and unspoiled local habitat. Within that biodiversity clean water and soils, balanced biogeochemical flows, access to freshwater, and minimal levels of pollution not least from novel entities. The local and the global ecosystems are connected through species’ activities and flow of matter carried by wind patterns and ocean currents.

Therefore, urban development activities lead to local consequences for ecosystems first and then these impact spreads to the global network of ecosystems. As for climate, impacts on ecosystems must be addressed both in the on-site development (local aspirations lens) and at the planetary level (global responsibility lens), throughout the entire supply chain, up and downstream, with ambitious regenerative practices.

These practices need to go beyond narrow green solutions that solely focus on the climate impact and address interconnected ecosystem perspectives as well. Human development has reached the point at which it cannot afford to degrade or lose more ecosystems without hampering its own development.