Environmental perspective of decarbonization actions in the Italian UNESCO site of the Vineyard landscape of Piedmont Region

Abstract

ABSTRACT The current EU regulatory framework is forcing the need for a substantial and significant reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in all the main economic sectors since climate change effects have been more tangible in recent years. The adoption of actions and measures to reduce CO2 emissions are thus essential for preventing global warming. For this reason, a simplified bottom-up approach is presented here to estimate the potential environmental benefit achievable, in terms of CO2 emissions saving, when a set of proposed energy efficiency measures were adopted in relevant economic sectors of the UNESCO area of Vineyard Landscape in Piedmont Region in Italy. Specifically, representative case studies were assumed for each economic sector being studied to identify the energy efficiency measures to be adopted. Then, progressive scenarios with different territorial diffusion of the proposed measures were performed. The analysis shows that a CO2 emission reduction from 7.1% to 32.4% can be potentially obtained by considering different diffusion pathways of the identified energy efficiency measures in the residential, accommodation, private transport, and food industry sectors, so that the UNESCO area can effectively contribute to contrast global warming. The proposed simplified approach can be replicated in other similar context to obtain rough estimation of emission savings due to territorial diffusion of energy efficiency measures considering available regional and local databases.