Developing Low-Carbon Communities with LEED-ND and Climate Tools and Policies in Sao Paulo, Brazil

The actual contribution of neighborhood sustainability assessment (NSA) tools to mitigate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in urban precincts is still unclear. This paper discusses the limitations and potentialities in the use of an NSA tool, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design for Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND), in the context of Sao Paulo, a developing country's megalopolis. It describes a multistep study that involves understanding and analyzing how the tool responds to (1) the sectors of GHG emission of a community-scale carbon footprint tool, Global Protocol for Community-Scale Greenhouse Gas Emission Inventories (GPC); (2) the GHG emissions of the municipality; (3) the strategies of the Municipal Climate Change Policy; and (4) the climate change related strategies of a local LEED-ND-certified precinct. Results show that although LEED-ND addresses the GPC's main sources of GHG emissions and the strategies of Sao Paulo's climate change policy, there is still a need to either improve or better integrate NSA with other tools in a systemic and contextualized approach that does not apply them in isolation.