Tanja Tötzer

Aspects of sustainability in innovation processes: results from a business survey in the Vienna region, Austria

The compatibility of sustainable development and economic growth is a much discussed issue. Sustainable innovations are believed to be able to realise both objectives. This paper focuses on sustainable innovation processes in companies that have been analysed in a business survey for the Vienna region in Austria. The survey results provide an up-to-date insight into sustainable innovation activities of 302 companies. It investigated how far these companies have generated new products, technologies or services, which hold environmental and social effects and support sustainable development. An especially interesting question was whether sustainability aspects are intended goals within the innovation processes and what kind of motivation they are aimed at. The results illustrate that certain key factors have to be in place to direct innovation processes towards sustainability. Commercial advantages and legal requirements were revealed to be the most important reasons assigned by companies for integrating sustainability aspects in innovation projects.

Modelling Micro-climate Characteristics for Urban Planning and Building Design

Climate sensitive urban planning and building design require detailed information on effects of a changing climate. To simulate thermal building performance appropriate data are required as “standardized weather files”. But as historic weather records cannot be used to model building performance for future climate, synthetic “future weather” data are necessary. Here we present the steps to derive such data for the urban development project “Seestadt Aspern” in Vienna. We start with regional climate simulations with 10x10 km grid spacing, where hourly data for years of current and future climate have been extracted for the Aspern area. Micro-scale simulations at 5m-resolution have been carried out to consider local influences on urban micro-climate, taking regional simulation results as framework condition. As micro-simulation results are delivered only for single days, transfer functions have been developed to generate synthetic weather records, turning hourly regional climate simulation results into local climate characteristics.

Cities and Urban Green

Cities are known to induce so called “urban heat island” effects. Therefore climate change will have a significant impact in urban environments upon thermal comfort. As urban green can mitigate local temperature peaks, green space is an essential feature in cities and one option to prevent decline of thermal comfort and related effects. Direct climate induced damages on urban green overlap with urban environmental stressors which are judged currently to be more critical than climate damages. Indirect climate induced damages of urban green will enforce subsequent negative effects of local temperature increase in cities: e.g. on health, tourism and urban economy which are difficult to delimit and quantify. The one robust option to quantify climate change damages used in this chapter is the preventative cost approach, i.e. damages are monetized by the level of costs that measures would imply to prevent increasing urban heat islands (here focusing on construction and maintenance of additional urban green).