Carbon budget-model sensitivity

A carbon budget is the amount of greenhouse gas emissions allowed over a period of time to keep within a global temperature rise threshold. A carbon budget captures the finite limits on a planet-wide scale and relates them to greenhouse gas emissions at the building scale. Carbon budgets model the emissions from all sources in a building’s life cycle, not just the energy consumed to operate the building. Carbon budgets can be more meaningful than the measures of energy efficiency alone currently being used in many countries. This project will test a recently developed carbon budget model for New Zealand for stand-alone housing, medium- density housing, apartments and commercial office buildings. It will enable a better understanding of the sensitivity of the outputs to input parameters. The project will identify modelling assumptions and input data that have the most significant impact on carbon budgets. This work will improve the robustness of our building carbon budgets in New Zealand. It aims to produce a robust metric that may be used for policy and other applications in the future. (NB; TEXT FROM LIA2020) This project aims to further develop the Carbon budget research already undertaken, to create a more robust metric that may be used for policy and other applications in the future. This next phase of work will involve: 1. Testing the existing Carbon budget models (for stand-alone housing, MDH, apartments and commercial office buildings) to better understand the sensitivity of the outputs to input parameters. 2. Identification of modelling assumptions and input data that have the most significant impact on the Carbon budgets. This will enable us to move on to the next phase of the work which will be to obtain more robust baseline carbon budget models by collecting more data for those processes and assumptions that make a significant contribution to the results.