 Your new post is loading...
Les discussions sur la transition énergétique se terminent souvent sur le constat que la sobriété est importante. L’ennui, c’est que ce concept n’est pas défini. Quel serait un mode de vie compatible avec les limites planétaires? Faut-il retourner à une civilisation purement agraire? Ou à l’âge de pierre? Une étude publiée en 2020 s’est intéressée à la question de l’énergie nécessaire au maintien d’un mode de vie « décent ». Leur conclusion : il est aujourd’hui possible d’avoir des frigos et des téléphones tout en consommant moins d’énergie que des paysans du XIXe siècle.
Impact First Development : An explorative study into (urban) development with the specific intention to create positive social impact
This research outcomes aim to inspire private parties in urban or real
estate development to place impact first in their ways of working. In
doing so, this thesis aims to open the dialogue about the responsibility of businesses to society and our cities and help developers and municipalities work towards more long-term sustainable and fair urban developments. For impact thinking to really take a flight in (urban) development, taxing or incentivizing impact by the government is necessary. Download
Lifestyle changes are key factors of the climate mitigation challenge because they drive the demand for energy, goods and food. They have received growing attention in the development and assessment of mitigation pathways, one of the key approaches used to inform mitigation policies. This paper contributes to this emerging literature by examining the political and scientific implications of integrating lifestyle changes into mitigation pathways. We analyse a large sample of pathways, supplemented by interviews with practitioners, to provide a perspective relevant to both scenario production practices themselves and the science-policy process in which they are included. We use three illustrative pathways to describe what it means to explore lifestyle changes and how this exploration can be conducted (indicators, dimensions, precision). We summarize the observed benefits of the explorations of lifestyle changes in scenario production by considering three main contributions of scenarios to policy decision-making: explicit knowledge, mediation tools and framing power.
Deep renovation of the buildings is a key for sustainable development, however, the rate of deep renovation of residential buildings in the European Union (EU) is lower than what is required to meet the climate and energy goals. This paper analyses peculiarities and commonalities in market conditions and approaches to deep renovation of single-family (or detached) houses in Denmark and Sweden. The market analysis covers the Political, Economic, Social and Technical (PEST) dimensions and is based on systematic literature review and findings of market gap analysis. The PEST analysis is complemented with responses from 49 stakeholders/experts to examine the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT analysis) for deep renovation market. The synthesis of SWOT and PEST led to some strategies for deep renovation. Furthermore, policies and strategies adopted by some other countries have been discussed to place findings from this study in the regional and global context. Capacity building in designing and managing deep renovation with technological advancement and construction practices; and enforcement of quality assurance systems of artisans could avoid the perceived risk and inconveniences associated with renovation. Encouraging systematically planned stepwise deep renovation through One-Stop shop and linking such renovation with appropriate financing mechanism could attract more homeowners with financial limitations. Besides, clustering several houses in need of renovation and appropriate energy/carbon pricing mechanisms could make the renovation market more attractive for investors and construction companies. The findings of this paper are of interest for the construction companies, policymakers, investors, and analysts about deep renovation market.
To strengthen Europe's knowledge base at local and regional level and to support the recovery from the Covid-19 crisis, the European Committee of the Regions (CoR) will step up its cooperation with European Commission's services in the field of research and innovation, education and culture. A new Action Plan signed between the two institutions aims to provide regions and cities with the latest data and knowledge and to help them tackle innovation divide and brain drain, address educational inequalities and deliver EU's political priorities, such as the Green Deal.
Which sectors are most suited to hydrogen, and which are not? For the answer, six academics from the UK and the Netherlands – Tom Baxter, Ernst Worrell, Hu Li, Petra de Jongh, Stephen Carr, and Valeska Ting – use their areas of expertise to neatly summarise hydrogen’s pros and cons in Road and Rail, Aviation, Heating, Electricity and Energy Storage, and Heavy Industry. Their general message seems clear: hydrogen is still very expensive, so it can be used primarily where there are no emissions-low alternatives, and where other advantages outweigh higher costs. Freight (trucks to trains) and aviation can benefit from liquid hydrogen’s very high energy density. Heavy industry needs the high temperatures that hydrogen can deliver better than electricity. But cars, heating, electricity and storage all have cheaper green alternatives meaning that hydrogen will only be a distraction, argue the authors.
In Thinking Like a Climate Hannah Knox confronts the challenges that climate change poses to knowledge production and modern politics. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among policy makers, politicians, activists, scholars, and the public in Manchester, England—birthplace of the Industrial Revolution—Knox explores the city's strategies for understanding and responding to deteriorating environmental conditions. Climate science, Knox argues, frames climate change as a very particular kind of social problem that confronts the limits of administrative and bureaucratic techniques of knowing people, places, and things. Exceeding these limits requires forging new modes of relating to climate in ways that reimagine the social in climatological terms. Knox contends that the day-to-day work of crafting and implementing climate policy and translating climate knowledge into the work of governance demonstrates that local responses to climate change can be scaled up to effect change on a global scale.
It is increasingly clear that averting ecological breakdown will require drastic changes to contemporary human society and the global economy embedded within it. On the other hand, the basic material needs of billions of people across the planet remain unmet. Here, we develop a simple, bottom-up model to estimate a practical minimal threshold for the final energy consumption required to provide decent material livings to the entire global population. We find that global final energy consumption in 2050 could be reduced to the levels of the 1960s, despite a population three times larger. However, such a world requires a massive rollout of advanced technologies across all sectors, as well as radical demand-side changes to reduce consumption – regardless of income – to levels of sufficiency. Sufficiency is, however, far more materially generous in our model than what those opposed to strong reductions in consumption often assume.
Climate change impacts and adaptation in Europe
The JRC PESETA IV study shows that ecosystems, people and economies in the EU will face major impacts from climate change if we do not urgently mitigate greenhouse gas emissions or adapt to climate change. The burden of climate change shows a clear north-south divide, with southern regions in Europe much more impacted, through the effects of extreme heat, water scarcity, drought, forest fires and agriculture losses. Limiting global warming to well below 2°C would considerably reduce climate change impacts in Europe. Adaptation to climate change would further minimize unavoidable impacts in a cost-effective manner, with considerable co-benefits from nature-based solutions. Read more
While the question of lifestyles and their sobriety has long been at the heart of ecological thinking, its explicit integration into national and international decarbonation pathways is relatively new. What methodological and substantive challenges does this development pose in terms of understanding, representing and projecting the ecological transition? Key Messages
- An evolution in low-carbon foresight exercises can be observed: it opens up a new field of possibilities and space for exploration by explicitly considering changes in lifestyle and behaviour.
- Better integrating these dimensions into foresight research can make four main contributions to the policy discussion: 1) showing the limits of current strategies and reaffirming the technical and social character of the transition; 2) shifting the focus to technical solutions and testing the feasibility and role of other transformations; 3) building a common language and making the transition more concrete; and 4) encouraging to increase our knowledge of social transformations and break out of disciplinary silos.
- These benefits can be realised provided that the political dimension of exploring lifestyles is recognised, that the challenges inherent in multidisciplinary approaches are overcome, and that specific methodologies are developed.
EU is moving towards a climate neutrality goal in 2050 with heating of buildings posing a major challenge. This paper provides a deep understanding of the historical development, path dependency and current status of the EU-28 residential heat sectors to inform strategy and policy makers and to open up this black box. Data is combined for buildings, installed technologies, fuel consumption and energy supply for Member States from 1990 to 2015, to analyse the importance of large-scale infrastructures and supply chains.
Amidst increasing awareness and growing media attention on individual action and lifestyle changes, it is crucial to understand how these societal aspects can be integrated structurally in the analysis of long-term decarbonisation pathways and included as a core component of debates on policies and actions. This Issue Brief clarifies the challenges and, based on the analysis of foresight exercises, provides conceptual frameworks that can help navigate the issues and structure political discussions.
Planning for climate change in cities provides the opportunity to consider the integration of mitigation and adaptation actions while maximising their synergies. This research study developed a scoring system to evaluate the level of integration of adaptation and mitigation, and analysed their synergies and co-benefits, in 147 EU urban Climate Change Action Plans (CCAPs).
|
In some cities, people are not travelling as far and as often as they did in the pre-COVID era. Philipp Rode (LSE) looks at the new patterns of movement and the challenges that will emerge as hyper-localisation becomes more common.
How can historic buildings become more energy efficient while conserving their heritage values? A doctoral thesis provides the answer by presenting a new method for combining climate goals and heritage values in historic buildings stocks.
This scientific paper analyses several European buildings such as schools, office buildings, healthcare centres and residential buildings to quantify the potential on comfort enhancement and energy saving through behavioral change of building users towards energy efficiency.
Meeting the climate target requires rapid realignment and mobilisation of finance at a massive scale. To avoid greenwashing, the EU's sustainable finance taxonomy needs to establish screening criteria, rooted in science and linked to the metrics of climate change, writes Peter Sweatman.
With a new research network, the city of Berlin aims to be able to better address central future issues such as climate protection, digitalization and sustainable economic activity. For the first time, Berlin's Senate Office for Higher Education and Research is funding a consortium of five independent, non-profit research institutes that are based in Berlin and part of the Ecological Research Network (Ecornet). Ecornet is a German network of independent research institutes with a focus on the environment and sustainability. The goal of this unprecedented research project "Wissen. Wandel. Berlin" is to strengthen Berlin's pioneering role in the development of innovative approaches to ensuring a livable, climate-neutral and sustainable city.
During its two years, Urban Sharing research team produced many academic and popular science publications. In particular, it delivered two full city reports on urban sharing in Amsterdam and Toronto. From these reports, the readers can learn about the landscape of the sharing economy in each city context. Specific focus is on three sectors: sharing of space, mobility and physical goods. For each sector, we discuss the drivers for and barriers to the sharing economy, the associated sustainability impacts, the potential impacts on incumbent sectors, and the institutional context of sharing. Then, attention is turned to the role of city councils in engaging with the sharing economy and specific governance mechanisms and roles employed by the city councils are described. Insights contained within these reports may support the Cities of Amsterdam, Toronto and other Sharing Cities, as well as urban sharing organisations and third-party actors in their strategic work with the sharing economy for sustainability.
The European Commission established the Covenant of Mayors (CoM) initiative in 2008, aimed at involving and supporting mayors to encourage accomplishing the European Union (EU) climate mitigation and energy targets. In 2014, the Mayors Adapt initiative was set up in order to promote the climate adaptation pillar. Whereas the mitigation pillar is more developed and peer-reviewed literature can be found, adaptation is still lagging behind, not to mention the absence of information on the effectiveness of the CoM concerning the development of climate adaptation plans. This paper aims at presenting a thorough analysis of climate hazard data declared by CoM signatories as well as the degree of regional agreement of those signatories when reporting climate data. Thus, we assume that the signatories belonging to the same climate region should report similar climate hazard data for both current and future timeframes. Using a new statistical method for measuring the variability of categorical data, we determine that, overall, the signatories show low agreement within climate regions. Hence, we conclude that the CoM, in the corresponding part of climate risk assessment, is not as effective as it could be desired. Furthermore, several recommendations are proposed to improve the current reporting.
Étudier la sobriété à partir des contraintes que connaissent des personnes en situation de précarité, c'est le pari d'une équipe de chercheurs dans le Nord-Pas-de-Calais. Les conclusions sont surprenantes : le sujet n'est pas tabou et permet même, à certaines conditions, de poser des questions politiques et éthiques fondamentales. Une source d'inspiration pour nos institutions ?
In this study by TNO, two scenarios (ADAPT and TRANSFORM) are used to explore the major changes in the Dutch energy system that may take place up to 2050. For both scenarios, the aim of the Dutch Climate Act has been taken as a starting point: a step-by-step reduction of GHG emissions in the Netherlands to a level that is 95% lower in 2050 than in 1990, which helps to implement the Paris Agreement to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees. The two scenarios are also designed to achieve the objective of the Dutch Climate Agreement: a reduction of GHG emissions by 49% in 2030. The scenarios differ in the way the goals are achieved, in particular the difference in intrinsic motivation of citizens and companies. In the ADAPT scenario, the Dutch economy builds on current strengths, chooses security and preserves the current lifestyle, but with a strong limitation of CO2 emissions. In the TRANSFORM scenario, the Dutch society is prepared to change behaviour and opts for a structural change to a more sustainable economy. This makes the Netherlands less energy intensive. The two scenarios are not meant to be compared with each other, but as to study the impact of certain choices in two different plausible futures for the Netherlands.
Some time ago the City of Genk, in collaboration with the other partners involved, applied for a regulatory sandbox at Thor Park. "Today Minister Zuhal Demir announced the Thor Park to be the first regulatory sandbox in Flanders. We are particularly pleased since this means that new opportunities are opening up for cooperation on the energy system of the future, " explains Mayor Wim Dries.
With their research, EnergyVille anticipates the changing energy system at Thor Park. Challenges are, for example, the mismatch between the less predictable production of sun and wind and the demand pattern of customers, changing consumption patterns of end users of technological innovations in the field of energy storage, smart charging of electric vehicles and smart control of heating and cooling. In addition to the theoretical part, experimental research activities are also essential.
This article presents a transdisciplinary modeling framework, which builds on the original Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathways methodology. To demonstrate the applicability of this framework the authors used it to explore the evolution of the small-scale solar photovoltaics share in Greece, towards the achievement of the national capacity targets of 2025 and 2030. Model outcomes facilitated the identification of several pathways achieving the capacity targets, while reducing the risk for retroactive policy changes. Overall, the presented study demonstrates potential to support the design of adaptive policies over contextual evolutions so that social, economic and technological aspects of integrative planning are balanced towards the achievement of climate targets.
Les scénarios de transition énergétique sont des outils indispensables au pilotage du secteur de l'énergie et, plus largement, de l'économie française. À partir d'hypothèses et d'une situation donnée, ils explorent l'évolution possible des systèmes énergétiques. Ils aident à fixer des objectifs de diminution des émissions de gaz à effet de serre (GES) ou d'évolution de la [...]
|
