Low-carbon technologies are now widely seen as key to mitigating the effects of climate change. To keep an eye on progress in this area, governments need to gauge how fast each industry is developing them and whether consumers are taking them up.
Now there鈥檚 a technique for doing just that. Keisuke Nansai and colleagues at Japan鈥檚 National Institute for Environmental Studies in Tsukuba say their method, called 鈥渆co-velocity鈥�, will allow governments to track an industry鈥檚 progress towards sustainability. The technique estimates the impact of an industry from manufacture to consumption 鈥� measured in tonnes of CO2 鈥� and compares that with how well it mitigates that impact through smarter manufacturing and energy-saving technologies. The nearer the ratio gets to 1 (that is, when impact equals mitigation), the closer the industry is to being sustainable. 鈥淥ver a ratio of 1, you are eco-speeding,鈥� says Nansai.
By measuring the changes in the ratio over time, it is possible to work out the rate of an industry鈥檚 progress towards carbon neutrality.
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Applying the measure to Japan鈥檚 industrial performance figures in 1995 and 2000, Nansei found that the growth of household consumption was greater than the rate of technological advance. The eco-velocity of personal computers, for example, shot up from 2.97 in 1995 to 3.95 in 2000, while the growth of the internet meant the IT sector had an eco-velocity of 25.1 in 2000, they report in the journal Environmental Science and Technology (DOI: 10/1021/es0615876).
