The talk with present the key results of the IPCC Working Group III 5th assessment report. Concluding four years of intense scientific collaboration by hundreds of authors from around the world, the report responds to the request of the world's governments for a comprehensive, objective and policy neutral assessment of the current scientific knowledge on mitigating climate change. The report has been extensively reviewed by experts and governments to ensure quality and comprehensiveness.

Climate change 2014 - Mitigation of climate change

The world must ambitiously curtail greenhouse gas emissions to achieve climate stability. The literature often supposes that a low-carbon future will depend on a mix of technological innovation-improving the performance of new technologies and systems-as well as more sustainable behaviours such as travelling less or reducing waste. To what extent are low-carbon technologies, and their associated behaviours, currently equitable, and what are potential policy and research implications moving forward? In this Review, we examine how four innovations in technology and behaviour-improved cookstoves and heating, battery electric vehicles, household solar panels and food-sharing-create complications and force trade-offs on different equity dimensions. We draw from these cases to discuss a typology of inequity cutting across demographic (for example, gender, race and class), spatial (for example, urban and rural divides), interspecies (for example, human and non-human) and temporal (for example, future generations) vulnerabilities. Ultimately, the risk of inequity abounds in decarbonization pathways. Moreover, low-carbon innovations are not automatically just, equitable or even green. We show how such technologies and behaviours can both introduce new inequalities and reaffirm existing ones. We then discuss potential policy insights and leverage points to make future interventions more equitable and propose an integrated research agenda to supplement these policy efforts. 

http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/102795/1/Sovacool-et-al-NHB-Equity-100721-Clean.pdf

Equity, technological innovation and sustainable behaviour in a low-carbon future

Energy efficiency, generation from renewable sources and more recently energy flexibility are key elements of present sustainability policies. However, we are beginning to see a recognition of the need to couple technological solutions with lifestyle and behavioral changes, sometimes labeled under the term “sufficiency”. Appropriate policies and design principles are necessary to enable sufficiency options, which in turn reveal that there is a bidirectional influence between the building and the district/city level. In this context, the authors discuss how city and building re-design should be implemented combining energy efficiency, flexibility, production from renewables and sufficiency options for achieving a positive energy balance at the district level even within the constraints of dense cities. Based on a review of recent advances, the paper provides a matrix of interactions between building and district design for use by building designers and city planners. It also compares possible scenarios implementing different strategies at the building and urban level in a case study, in order to evaluate the effect of the proposed integrated approach on the energy balance at yearly and seasonal time scales and on land take.

https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/15/4697/pdf

Combining Sufficiency, Efficiency and Flexibility to Achieve Positive Energy Districts Targets

Doing more with less: Provisioning systems and the transformation of the stock-flow-service nexus

Careful attention to choice architecture promises to open up new possibilities for reducing greenhouse gas emissions—possibilities that go well beyond, and that may supplement or complement, the standard tools of economic incentives, mandates, and bans. How, for example, do consumers choose between climate-friendly products or services and alternatives that are potentially damaging to the climate but less expensive? The answer may well depend on the default rule. Indeed, climate-friendly default rules may well be a more effective tool for altering outcomes than large economic incentives. The underlying reasons include the power of suggestion; inertia and procrastination; and loss aversion. If well-chosen, climate-friendly defaults are likely to have large effects in reducing the economic and environmental harms associated with various products and activities. In deciding whether to establish climate-friendly defaults, choice architects (subject to legal constraints) should consider both consumer welfare and a wide range of other costs and benefits. Sometimes that assessment will argue strongly in favor of climate-friendly defaults, particularly when both economic and environmental considerations point in their direction. Notably, surveys in 17 countries worldwide show that majorities in many nations are in favor of climate-friendly defaults.

/pdf/climate-friendly-default-rules-5apz6edafh.pdf

Climate-Friendly Default Rules

As current action remains insufficient to meet the goals of the Paris agreement let alone to stabilize the climate, there is increasing hope that solutions related to demand, services and social aspects of climate change mitigation can close the gap. However, given these topics are not investigated by a single epistemic community, the literature base underpinning the associated research continues to be undefined. Here, we aim to delineate a plausible body of literature capturing a comprehensive spectrum of demand, services and social aspects of climate change mitigation. As method we use a novel double-stacked expert—machine learning research architecture and expert evaluation to develop a typology and map key messages relevant for climate change mitigation within this body of literature. First, relying on the official key words provided to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change by governments (across 17 queries), and on specific investigations of domain experts (27 queries), we identify 121 165 non-unique and 99 065 unique academic publications covering issues relevant for demand-side mitigation. Second, we identify a literature typology with four key clusters: policy, housing, mobility, and food/consumption. Third, we systematically extract key content-based insights finding that the housing literature emphasizes social and collective action, whereas the food/consumption literatures highlight behavioral change, but insights also demonstrate the dynamic relationship between behavioral change and social norms. All clusters point to the possibility of improved public health as a result of demand-side solutions. The centrality of the policy cluster suggests that political actions are what bring the different specific approaches together. Fourth, by mapping the underlying epistemic communities we find that researchers are already highly interconnected, glued together by common interests in sustainability and energy demand. We conclude by outlining avenues for interdisciplinary collaboration, synthetic analysis, community building, and by suggesting next steps for evaluating this body of literature.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abd78b/pdf

Reviewing the scope and thematic focus of 100 000 publications on energy consumption, services and social aspects of climate change: a big data approach to demand-side mitigation *

The new-type urbanization which emphasizes urban infrastructure improvement, together with neighboring cities, may influence CO2 emissions of urban facilities and energy-intensive industrial sectors. This study analyzes the spillover effects of new-type urbanization on CO2 emissions of the central heating sector in northern China during 2012–2019. We measured the new-type urbanization from six dimensions, then built three spatial Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) models based on an extended stochastic impact by regression on population, affluence, and technology (STIRPAT) framework. Our results show that CO2 emissions at the city level increased by 18.0% for every 1% increase in that city's own new-type urbanization level, while decreasing by 7.58% for every 1% rise in the average new-type urbanization level of its neighboring cities. The results indicate an inverted “U-shaped” relationship between new-type urbanization and CO2 emissions, and the peak will be earlier due to the spillover effects of urbanization at the city level. 

Can Wan

Papers

Reviewing the scope and thematic focus of 100 000 publications on energy consumption, services and social aspects of climate change: a big data approach to demand-side mitigation *

Direct and spillover effects of new-type urbanization on CO2 emissions from central heating sector and EKC analyses: Evidence from 144 cities in China