Modelling greenhouse gas emissions savings from circular cities

This 4-year studentship is funded by EPSRC and is open both to UK and EU applicants. The PhD training and research will be carried out within the Centre for Doctoral Training in the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London. The research aims to determine the reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions resulting from transitioning to a circular development pathway in cities (see http://circularcitieshub.com/ for more information).

The circular development pathway integrates resource looping (e.g. grey-water and infrastructure recycling, energy recovery); urban adaptation (flexible infrastructure, spaces, self-organising communities); and ecological regeneration (the restoration of urban ecosystem services), to enable the city-region to co-evolve with societal needs, whilst reducing its ecological footprint and GHG emissions (through sequestration, energy recovery, localising resource flows, reducing waste going to landfill, etc). The research will produce methodologies and tools which can be used by cities to calculate the emissions savings they can make from adopting this approach.