Evaluating the Transition Towards Post-Carbon Cities: A Literature Review

To achieve the new European targets concerning CO2 emission reduction, the concept of a post-carbon city has been promoted, which is focused on low-energy and low-emission buildings provided with intelligent heating and cooling systems, electric and hybrid cars, and better public transport. This paradigm entails the inclusion of aspects not strictly related to energy exploitation but referring to environmental, social, and economic domains, such as improvement in local energy security, people’s opinion on different energy solutions, economic co-benefits for private users, environmental externalities, and so on. In this domain, it is of particular importance to provide the decision makers with evaluation tools able to consider the complexity of the impacts, thus leading to the choice of the most sustainable solutions. The paper aims to investigate the scientific literature in the context of evaluation frameworks for supporting decision problems related to the energy transition. The review is carried out through the scientific database SCOPUS. The analysis allows for systematizing the contributions according to the main families of evaluation methodologies, discussing to what extent they can be useful in real-world applications. The paper also proposes emerging trends and innovative research lines in the domain of energy planning and urban management. While the energy transition is an important trend, the analysis showed that few studies were conducted on the evaluation of projects, plans, and policies that aim to reach post-carbon targets. The scales of application refer mainly to global or national levels, while few studies have been developed at the district level. Life cycle thinking techniques, such as life cycle assessment and cost-benefit analysis, were widely used in this research field.