tooffsetCO2.PDFVIP

To appear in Climatic Change Vol. 95 Joint Issue 3-4 (MayJune 2009) Climatic Change DOI 10.1007/s10584-008-9515-9 Global cooling: increasing world-wide urban albedos to offset CO2 Hashem Akbari · Surabi Menon · Arthur Rosenfeld Received: 29 January 2008 / Accepted: 4 September 2008 ? Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2008 Abstract Increasing urban albedo can reduce summertime temperatures, resulting in better air quality and savings from reduced air-conditioning costs. In addition, increasing urban albedo can result in less absorption of incoming solar radiation by the surface-troposphere system, countering to some extent the global scale effects of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. Pavements and roofs typically constitute over 60% of urban surfaces (roof 20–25%, pavements about 40%). Using re?ective materials, both roof and pavement albedos can be increased by about 0.25 and 0.15, respectively, resulting in a net albedo increase for urban areas of about 0.1. On a global basis, we estimate that increasing the world-wide albedos of urban roofs and paved surfaces will induce a negative radiative forcing on the earth equivalent to offsetting about 44 Gt of CO2 emissions. At ～$25/tonne of CO2, a 44 Gt CO2 emission offset from changing the albedo of roofs and paved surfaces is worth about $1,100 billion. Furthermore, many studies have demonstrated reductions of more than 20% in cooling costs for buildings whose rooftop albedo has been increased from 10–20% to about 60% (in the US, potential savings exceed $1 billion per year). Our estimated CO2 offsets from albedo modi?cations are dependent on assumptions used in this study, but nevertheless demonstrate remarkable global cooling potentials that may be obtained from cooler roofs and pavements. 1 Introduction In many urban areas, pavements and roofs constitute over 60% of urban surfaces (see Table 1; roof 20–25%, pavements about 40%) (Akbari et al. 2003; Rose et al. H. Akbari (B) · S. Menon Lawrence Berkeley N