Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Fields of Study
- Environment & Climate
Areas of Interest
Strategies for decarbonizing energy use, with a particular focus on energy use in buildings.
Graduate Student Supervision
In my graduate student supervision I am focusing on efficient use of energy in buildings and/or the integration of on-site renewable energy in buildings. Students with training in these areas and strong quantitative skills are invited to contact me as a potential MSc or PhD supervisor. Potential applicants at the PhD level should have a specific research question in mind that fills an identifiable research gap and which builds on their previous publications and training.
Biography
Danny Harvey is a Full Professor in the Department of Geography, University of Toronto, where he teaches courses related to climate, global warming and energy use. He completed his PhD in the area of climate modelling at the Department of Geography, University of Toronto, in 1985, but with extended visits to the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, the Laboratoire de Glaciologie in Grenoble, France, and the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique in Paris.
During the 1980s and 1990s his work focused on climate and carbon cycle modelling, with a particular interest in the global-scale impacts on climate of alternative emission scenarios. He published two textbooks on the science of global warming in 2000, Climate and Global Environmental Change (240 pages), and Global Warming: The Hard Science (336 pages), both published by Prentice Hall and aimed at undergraduate and graduate students, respectively.
During the 2000s, Professor Harvey’s work began a transition to questions related to energy use and how to make the transition to a fossil-fuel free energy system by the middle to end of this century. In 2006 he published A Handbook on Low-Energy Buildings and District Energy Systems: Fundamentals, Techniques, and Examples (Earthscan, 701 pages), a comprehensive overview and explanation of the design and retrofit of buildings for minimal use of energy, targeted at practicing architects, engineers and developers. In 2010 he published (also with Earthscan) the 2-volume work, Energy and the New Reality, Volume 1: Energy Efficiency and the Demand for Energy Services (614 pages) and Volume 2: C-Free Energy Supply, which develops options for stabilizing greenhouse gases as levels no greater than a CO2-doubling equivalent. Major areas of research focus since then have concerned policies and scenarios for achieving zero greenhouse gas emissions related to transportation and buildings, and more recently, the steel industry.
Professor Harvey served as convening lead author on IPCC Technical Report No.2 (An Introduction to Simple Climate Models Used in the IPCC Second Assessment Report, 1996) and as a lead author for the chapter related to buildings in the Working III report for the Fourth IPCC Assessment Report (2007) and for the Fifth IPCC Assessment Report, released in April 2014. He is a co-author of the report by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA, based in Austria), Global Energy Assessment, released in mid 2012. He has been a member of the editorial board of the journal Climatic Change since 1988 and is now a Deputy Editor of the journal. In addition to the five books and contributions to IPCC and IIASA listed above, Professor Harvey has published about 80 papers in scientific peer-reviewed journals, 6 book chapters, and numerous book reviews and commentaries.
Professor Harvey is an advisor to the policy research and advocacy group Environmental Defense and to the climate-solutions-oriented investment firm, Scope Four Capital.
Some recent publications
“Recent advances in sustainable buildings: review of the energy and cost performance of the state-of-the-art best practices from around the world”, Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 38, 281-309, 2013.
“Global climate-oriented transportation scenarios”, Energy Policy, 54, 87-103, 2013.
“Global climate-oriented building energy use scenarios”, Energy Policy, 67, 473-487, 2014.
“Using modified multiple Heating-degree-day (HDD) and Cooling-degree-day (CDD) indices to estimate building heating and cooling loads”, Energy and Buildings 229, 110475, 2020.
“Iron and Steel Recycling: Review, Conceptual Model, and Irreducible Mining Requirements”, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 138, 110553, 2020.
“Savings in fertilizer requirements from vegetarian and vegan diets”, Resources, Conservation, Recycling 190, 106820, 2023.