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Urban energy systems have been commonly considered to be socio-technical systems within the boundaries of an urban area. However, recent literature challenges this notion in that it urges researchers to look at the wider interactions and influences of urban energy systems wherein the socio-technical sphere is expanded to political, environmental and economic realms as well. In addition to the inter-sectoral linkages, the diverse agents and multilevel governance trends of energy sustainability in the dynamic environment of cities make the urban energy landscape a complex one. There is a strong case then for establishing a new conceptualisation of urban energy systems that builds upon these contemporary understandings of such systems. We argue that the complex systems approach can be suitable for this. In this paper, we propose a pilot framework for understanding urban energy systems using complex systems theory as an integrating plane. We review the multiple streams of urban energy literature to identify the contemporary discussions and construct this framework that can serve as a common ontological understanding for the different scholarships studying urban energy systems. We conclude the paper by highlighting the ways in which the framework can serve some of the relevant communities.
The 2014 United Nations Climate Change Conference had been scheduled from 1 to 12 December in Lima/Peru. While in the run-up to the conference, China and the US in a surprise bilateral move had announced plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions that exceeded expectations, the conference was characterised once again by a deep division between key players from the former so-called "developed" and "developing" world. The negotiations thus took 32 hours longer than planned and ended on Sunday morning at 1.22 am. More importantly, the conference failed almost completely to resolve the tasks it was supposed to do in order to prepare the last round of negotiations before next year's conference in Paris 2015, which is supposed to deliver a comprehensive future climate agreement. A team of researchers from the Wuppertal Institute attended the conference and have compiled a first assessment of the results.
Agriculture is a major sector responsible for greenhouse gas emissions. Local food production can contribute to reducing transport-related emissions. Since most of the worldwide population lives in cities, locally producing food implies practicing agriculture in urban and peri-urban areas. Exemplary, we analyze the potential to produce fresh vegetables within Berlin, Germany. We investigate the spatial extent of five different urban spaces for soil-based agriculture or gardening, i.e., non-built residential areas, allotment gardens, rooftops, supermarket parking lots, and cemeteries. We also quantify inputs required for such food production in terms of water, human resources, and investment. Our findings highlight that up to 82% of Berlin’s vegetable demand could be produced within the city, based on a reasonable validation of existing areas. Meeting this potential requires 42 km2 of urban spaces for cultivation, a considerable amount of irrigation water, around 17 thousand gardeners, and over 750 million EUR of initial investments. The final vegetable cost would be around 2 EUR to 10 EUR per kg without any profit margin. We conclude that it is realistic to produce a significant amount of Berlin's vegetable demand within the city, even if it comes with great challenges.
Optimization and simulation models are fit to work on a multitude of technical, economic, and techno-economic questions. However, they are by now not able to satisfactorily include societal aspects like acceptance, spatial implications and legal frameworks. In order to advance scope and explanatory power of simulation models, collaboration in interdisciplinary research teams is needed. Yet the exchange in such teams and its coordination can prove challenging. Furthermore, disciplinary approaches and methods for simulation and optimization might not be familiar to all participants.
To this end, a new conceptual model is introduced. The conceptual model employs few basic elements and concepts for describing and explaining arbitrary societal and technical relationships. Most notably, the conceptual model is general in its design, so contributions to the problem formulation and design components can be made by all team members regardless of their discipline. The procedure is based on common agent-based concepts without using their terminology. Consequently, an exchange among all team members becomes possible without them necessarily being proficient in agent-based modeling. A reduced presentation of workshop results exemplifies the use of novel elements for deriving an emergent agent-based simulation.
This article develops a sectoral approach to the analysis of global climate governance. This approach advances the assessment of global climate governance by focusing on complexes of intergovernmental and transnational institutions co-governing key socio-technical sectoral systems. The actual and potential contribution of these sectoral institutional complexes to advancing decarbonization can be assessed according to five key governance functions: (1) providing guidance and signal to actors, (2) setting rules to facilitate collective action, (3) enhancing transparency and accountability, (4) offering support (finance, technology, capacity-building), and (5) promoting knowledge and learning. On this basis, we can assess the potential of international cooperation to address the challenges specific sectoral systems face in the climate transition as well as the extent to which existing sectoral institutional complexes deliver on this potential. This provides a solid starting point for developing options for filling identified gaps and enhancing the effectiveness of global climate governance.
A sectoral perspective on international climate governance : key findings and research priorities
(2021)
This concluding article derives six major findings from the contributions to this special issue. First, the barriers and challenges to decarbonisation vary significantly across sectoral systems. Second, and similarly, the need and potential for the five functions of international governance institutions to contribute to effective climate protection also vary widely. Third, while the pattern is uneven, there is a general undersupply of international climate governance. Fourth, the sectoral analyses confirm that the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement play an important overarching role but remain limited in advancing effective sectoral governance. Fifth, while non-environmental institutions may present important barriers to decarbonisation, more synergistic effects are possible. Sixth, our sectoral approach provides a sound basis on which to identify sector-specific policy options. The paper then offers reflections on the merits and limitations of the sectoral approach, before identifying avenues for future research to further advance the agenda.
Achieving sustainable mobility in developing countries : suggestions for a post-2012 agreement
(2009)
In December 2009, countries meet in Copenhagen to establish a new global climate agreement. This article links the need for reducing transport-related greenhouse gas emissions in developing countries with the current international climate negotiations. Arguing that a sustainable transport approach requires comprehensive policy packages, it assesses the suitability of current climate negotiation proposals in promoting sustainable transport. The project-based approach under the current climate regime incentivises neither comprehensive sustainable transport and mobility policies, nor sufficient numbers of local projects. Current proposals to increase efforts by developing countries, to reform the Clean Development Mechanism, and to create new emission trading mechanisms are promising but still have to overcome several obstacles. One obstacle involves how to properly assess the impact of actions while maintaining streamlined procedures. The authors conclude from their analysis that the best way forward would be to establish an international mitigation fund with a dedicated transport window financed by industrialised countries. This fund would enable developing countries to implement national policies and local projects. Developing countries would outline low-carbon development strategies, including a sectoral strategy for low-carbon transport.
Additionality revisited : guarding the integrity of market mechanisms under the Paris agreement
(2019)
The Paris Agreement requires mitigation contributions from all Parties. Therefore, the determination of additionality of activities under the market mechanisms of its Article 6 will need to be revisited. This paper provides recommendations on how to operationalize additionality under Article 6. We first review generic definitions of additionality and current approaches for testing of additionality before discussing under which conditions additionality testing of specific activities or policies is still necessary under the new context of the Paris Agreement, that is, in order to prevent increases of global emissions. We argue that the possibility of "hot air" generation under nationally-determined contributions (NDCs) requires an independent check of the NDC's ambition. If the NDC of the transferring country does contain "hot air", or if the transferred emission reductions are not covered by the NDC, a dedicated additionality test should be required. While additionality tests of projects and programmes could continue to be done through investment analysis, for policy instruments new approaches are required. They should be differentiated according to type of policy instrument. For regulation, we suggest calculating the resulting pay-back period for technology users. If the regulation generates investments exceeding a payback period threshold, it could be deemed additional. Similarly, carbon pricing policies that generate a carbon price exceeding a threshold could qualify; for trading schemes an absence of over-allocation needs to be shown. The threshold should be differentiated according to country categories and rise over time.
More and more countries are incorporating the instrument of emissions trading into their national climate policies. This emerging mosaic of emissions trading schemes (ETS) raises the question of whether they should be linked with each other. From an economic point of view, linking of domestic schemes is supposed to increase the economic efficiency of carbon markets. In addition, linking is also expected by some to yield substantial political benefits in terms of the evolution of the UNFCCC/Kyoto regime. However, these optimistic prospects are based on a best-case scenario where all major countries establish environmentally effective emissions trading systems and then link them with each other. Real-life politics might develop rather differently. This paper therefore examines to what extent the current status of emissions trading in industrialised countries provides a basis for reinforcing and moving forward the international climate regime through linking domestic ETS. After comparing emerging emissions trading schemes from an institutional perspective, it emerges that not only emissions trading is at a very early stage in most countries, in addition the emerging systems are probably going to be designed very differently from the EU ETS. While for some design features such as the coverage design differences do not matter, there are some areas where the plans in many non-EU countries look crucially different from the EU system. The outlook for a linked international ETS is therefore currently still very uncertain. Given this state of affairs, the EU should pro-actively engage with the non-EU countries to try to harmonise their developing national emissions trading schemes with the EU ETS, widely disseminate the lessons it has learned from the EU ETS, strongly make the case for environmental integrity and at the same time make clear that systems that want to link to the EU ETS will need to meet certain quality criteria.
Africa and in particular African Least Developed Countries have to a large extent been neglected by the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). This article reviews the mechanism's performance in the region and highlights current developments. The analysis is based on a quantitative breakdown of data provided by the United Nations Environment Programme and Technical University of Denmark (UNEP/DTU) CDM Pipeline and was complemented by interviews with selected investors. The findings indicate that despite the various support measures for underrepresented regions, the overall share of African CDM activities continues to be low. The significant rise in the share of Programmes of Activities of recent years cannot make up for the continuing low numbers of African stand-alone projects. Further, the collapse of the compliance market has proved fatal in terms of timing: ongoing efforts to support the development of a genuine African carbon market were suffocated by the lack of demand for Certified Emission Reductions at a moment when capacity building had started to bear fruit. Consequently, instead of being a mitigation tool with significant scale, the future role of the CDM in Africa might be limited to the voluntary market, while at the same time serving as a tool to foster sustainable development, with mitigation benefits.
The objective of analytical strategic environmental assessment (ANSEA) is to provide a decision-centred approach to the SEA process. The ANSEA project evolved from the realisation that, in many cases, SEA, as currently practised, is not able to ensure an appropriate integration of environmental values. The focus of SEA is on predicting impacts, but the tool takes no account of the decision-making processes it is trying to influence. At strategic decision-making levels, in turn, it is often difficult to predict impacts with the necessary exactitude. The decision-making sciences could teach some valuable lessons here. Instead of focusing on the quantitative prediction of environmental consequences, the ANSEA approach concentrates on the integration of environmental objectives into decision-making processes. Thus, the ANSEA approach provides a framework for analysing and assessing the decision-making processes of policies, plans and programmes (PPP). To enhance environmental integration into the decision-making process, decision windows (DW) can be identified. The approach is designed to be objective and transparent to ensure that environmental considerations are taken into account, or - from an ex-post perspective - to allow an evaluation of how far environmental considerations have been integrated into the decision-making process under assessment. The paper describes the concepts and the framework of the ANSEA approach and discusses its relation to SEA and the EC Directive.
Energy Efficiency First (EEF) is an established principle for European Union (EU) energy policy design. It highlights the exploitation of demand-side resources and prioritizes cost-effective options from the demand-side over other options from a societal cost-benefit perspective. However, the involvement of multiple decision-makers makes it difficult to implement. Therefore, we propose a flexible decision-tree framework for applying the EEF principle based on a review of relevant areas and examples. In summary, this paper contributes to applying the EEF principle by defining and distinguishing different types of cases - (1) policy-making, and (2) system planning and investment - identifying the most common elements, and proposing a decision-tree framework that can be flexibly constructed based on the elements for different cases. Finally, we exemplify the application of this framework with two example cases: (1) planning for demand-response in the power sector, and (2) planning for a district heating system.
To address climate change, the decarbonisation of Germany's existing building stock urgently needs to be prioritised. However, the rate and depth of refurbishment has lagged behind official targets for years. This is a particular problem in the rental sector, where the costs and benefits of energy efficiency measures tend to be unevenly distributed between landlords and tenants (the so-called "landlord-tenant dilemma"). Within the context of the current policy landscape, investments in energy efficiency consequently make most sense for landlords if the upfront costs can be refinanced via increased rental income or reduced vacant periods. This paper seeks to investigate the validity of this statement at city level by using a large dataset from one of Germany’s main internet property platforms to examine how the willingness of tenants to pay for energy efficiency varies across residential locations in the city of Wuppertal.
The small-scale spatial analysis highlights the existence of a price premium for energy efficiency in the rental market for apartments; however, this premium is generally small (especially in comparison to other property enhancements, especially visible improvements) or even non-existent in some residential areas. Consequently, investing in energy efficiency is rarely an attractive option for landlords. Therefore, strong policy action, aligned with social and urban development policy objectives, is necessary to establish an effective incentive structure in the market and make investing in energy efficiency more attractive for both landlords and tenants.
Tackling fuel poverty has become an increasingly important issue on many European countries' political agendas. Consequently, national governments, local authorities and NGOs have established policies and programmes to reduce the fuel poverty vulnerability of households. However, evaluations of such policies and programmes show that they barely reach those who are most in need. The reasons for this failure are diverse and include fuel poverty measurement metrics, local scale data availability and policy design. This raises the question of how fuel poor homes can be more effectively identified and targeted to ensure that limited local and national budgets are used to benefit those who most need help.
Area-based approaches, which pinpoint spatial units highly affected by fuel poverty due to their specific characteristics, offer an opportunity for creating more tailored policies and programmes. In this study, the author developed a GIS-MCDA (Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis), using an AHP (Analytical Hierarchy Process) and applied the approach to the German city of Oberhausen. The overall issue of fuel poverty was broken down into three vulnerability dimensions (heating burden, socio-economic and building vulnerability), the relative importance of fuel poverty criteria and the dimensions were evaluated by experts, and an overall Fuel Poverty Index was created to assess the relative fuel poverty vulnerability of 168 urban neighbourhoods.
The analysis offers insights into the spatial pattern of fuel poverty within a city and thus provides an opportunity to channel efforts towards households in those neighbourhoods most in need. It also demonstrates that a trade-off between ecological and social targets should be considered in the development of future policies for tackling fuel poverty.
The need for sustainable energy management at the municipal level is growing, in order to meet EU climate goals. Multiple initiatives have been launched to support municipalities in energy planning and strategy development process. Despite available support, research shows mixed results about implementation of plans and strategies. This research paper analyses what targets municipalities set, how they monitor implementation of their sustainable energy action plans (SEAPs) and searches for the most important factors that have enabled or hindered the implementation of local SEAPs at Latvia. The article shows that, in some cases, there is evidence that SEAP development is a project-based activity, supported by external experts. From municipal personnel point of view, it is a project that ends with approved SEAP, but not a part of their future daily routine. Eventually implementation of the plan is difficult, because municipalities lack experience in daily management of energy data, distribution of responsibilities and implementation of procedures. Municipalities also tend to exclude important stakeholders in their SEAPs, like, private sector, household sector and transport sector, which lead to lower targets and lower achievements in GHG reduction.
This study analyzes the usefulness of an attitude-based target group approach in predicting the ecological impact of mobility behavior. Based on a survey of 1,991 inhabitants of three large German cities, constructs derived from an expanded version of the Theory of Planned Behavior were used to identify distinct attitude-based target groups. Five groups were identified, each representing a unique combination of attitudes, norms, and values. The groups differed significantly from each other with regard to travel-mode choice, distances traveled, and ecological impact. In comparison with segmentations based on sociodemographic and geographic factors, the predictive power of the attitude-based approach was higher, especially with regard to the use of private motorized modes of transportation. The opportunities and limits of reducing the ecological impact of mobility behavior on the basis of an attitude-based target group approach are discussed.
Power-law city-size distributions are a statistical regularity researched in many countries and urban systems. In this history of science treatise we reconsider Felix Auerbach’s paper published in 1913. We reviewed his analysis and found (i) that a constant absolute concentration, as introduced by him, is equivalent to a power-law distribution with exponent ≈1, (ii) that Auerbach describes this equivalence, and (iii) that Auerbach also pioneered the empirical analysis of city-size distributions across countries, regions, and time periods. We further investigate his legacy as reflected in citations and find that important follow-up work, e.g. by Lotka (Elements of physical biology. Williams & Wilkins Company, Baltimore, 1925) and Zipf (Human behavior and the principle of least effort: an introduction to human ecology, Martino Publishing, Manfield Centre, CT (2012), 1949), does give proper reference to his discovery - but others do not. For example, only approximately 20% of city-related works citing Zipf (1949) also cite Auerbach (Petermanns Geogr Mitteilungen 59(74):74–76, 1913). To our best knowledge, Lotka (1925) was the first to describe the power-law rank-size rule as it is analyzed today. Saibante (Metron Rivista Internazionale di Statistica 7(2):53–99, 1928), building on Auerbach and Lotka, investigated the power-law rank-size rule across countries, regions, and time periods. Zipf's achievement was to embed these findings in his monumental 1949 book. We suggest that the use of “Auerbach–Lotka–Zipf law” (or "ALZ-law") is more appropriate than "Zipf's law for cities", which also avoids confusion with Zipf’s law for word frequency. We end the treatise with biographical notes on Auerbach.
Demand-side mitigation strategies have been gaining momentum in climate change mitigation research. Still, the impact of different approaches in passenger transport, one of the largest energy demand sectors, remains unclear. We couple a transport simulation model to an energy system optimisation model, both highly disintegrated in order to compare those impacts. Our scenarios are created for the case of Germany in an interdisciplinary, qualitative-quantitative research design, going beyond techno-economic assumptions, and cover Avoid, Shift, and Improve strategies, as well as their combination. The results show that sufficiency - Avoid and Shift strategies - have the same impact as the improvement of propulsion technologies (i.e. efficiency), which is reduction of generation capacities by one quarter. This lowers energy system transformation cost accordingly, but requires different kinds of investments: Sufficiency measures require public investment for high-quality public services, while efficiency measures require individuals to purchase more expensive vehicles at their own cost. These results raise socio-political questions of system design and well-being. However, all strategies are required to unleash the full potential of climate change mitigation.
It has been widely recognized that there is an urgent need for more sustainable urban transport policy and planning. To understand ambitious policy approaches, "relatively successful" cities are regularly subject of analyses. This paper also focuses on relatively successful cities - by reviewing the application documents of the winner cities of the European Green Capital Award (EGCA). Award schemes not only aim to reward leading participants, but likewise aim to contribute to knowledge transfer and the dissemination of good practice examples to non-participants. So far award schemes and good practice approaches have received limited attention by research. This paper reviews and analyses the application forms of the EGCA winning cities to learn about ambitious policy approaches to sustainable and climate-friendly urban transport.
The paper presents the results of an ex-ante evaluation of the economy-wide benefits that may be achieved through the implementation of the 20-year Energy Efficiency Action Plan (EEAP) in Thailand. The objective of the EEAP is to reduce energy intensity by 25 % in 2030 compared to 2010. This is to be reached by reducing the projected energy consumption by 20 % or 38 Mtoe until 2030. We have specified an analytical framework, which allows for a calculation of the overall energy cost savings, energy import cost reductions and reduced CO2 emissions. Moreover, we calculated the induced energy efficiency investments, employment effects and impacts on governmental budget. The evaluation shows that an effective implementation of the plan may lead to a reduction in energy expenditure of 37.7 billion EUR by 2030. Moreover, the EEAP-induced energy savings will significantly reduce the greenhouse gas emissions as well as Thailand’s energy import costs and generate private investment in energy efficiency of about 5 billion EUR annually in 2030, which in turn may lead to about 300,000 new jobs. The size of the net impact of the plan on Thailand’s governmental budget is uncertain due to positive and negative effects on corporate and income tax revenues, expenses for unemployment benefits, governmental energy consumption, expenses for energy subsidies and energy tax income.
The German government aims to achieve virtually climate-neutral building stock by 2050 to tackle climate change. To realise this goal, comprehensive policy packages based on neoclassical economic theory are in place to foster energy efficiency investment. However, in the building sector, there is increasingly a gap between this aspiration and the reality. It is claimed that one of the main reasons for this is that the existing policy framework fails to address the specific characteristics and needs of different groups of building owners. This is a particular challenge in Germany, where 80% of all dwellings are owned privately and 37% are rented out by small private landlords (SPL). Despite the significant numbers of SPL, they often follow black box decision-making processes when considering energy renovations. In this study, the author uses an explanatory model to understand the decision-making processes of SPL, combining theoretical aspects from different research disciplines. This model was applied to a low-demand housing market in a neighbourhood in the Ruhr area. Eighteen semi-structured interviews (each lasting between 37 and 115 min) were conducted, demonstrating that in addition to economic factors, the values, beliefs, norms and routines of SPL - as well as their personal capabilities and contextual factors - play an important role in their decision-making. Based on the findings, recommendations are made for enhancing the effectiveness of existing energy efficiency policies and other supporting instruments (e.g. tenancy law and social legislation), tailored to the specific needs of SPL.
Policy evaluation is widely considered important for assessing policies for effectiveness and impact. Municipalities are among the political actors implementing energy and climate policy. Yet, few municipalities have introduced adequate instruments to monitor the effectiveness of their actions. Often, municipal actors consider local greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories to be sufficient to monitor the impact of their actions. This paper points out why the expectations placed on local GHG inventories as a monitoring instrument can rarely be met in practice. On the basis of German examples, it shall be shown that a thorough calculation of actual local energy and GHG reductions attributable to local efforts is often only partially possible, and is complicated by external factors. A supplementary approach to the top-down method is to evaluate local programmes from the bottom-up. This paper discusses efforts to develop an instrument for a bottom-up monitoring of the city of Hamburg's Climate Action Plan.
Sufficiency measures are potentially decisive for the decarbonisation of energy systems but rarely considered in energy policy and modelling. Just as efficiency and renewable energies, the diffusion of demand-side solutions to climate change also relies on policy-making. Our extensive literature review of European and national sufficiency policies fills a gap in existing databases. We present almost 300 policy instruments clustered into relevant categories and publish them as "Energy Sufficiency Policy Database". This paper provides a description of the data clustering, the set-up of the database and an analysis of the policy instruments. A key insight is that sufficiency policy includes much more than bans of products or information tools leaving the responsibility to individuals. It is a comprehensive instrument mix of all policy types, not only enabling sufficiency action, but also reducing currently existing barriers. A policy database can serve as a good starting point for policy recommendations and modelling, further research is needed on barriers and demand-reduction potentials of sufficiency policy instruments.
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected human mobility via lockdowns, social distancing rules, home quarantines, and the full or partial suspension of transportation. Evidence-based policy recommendations are urgently needed to ensure that transport systems have resilience to future pandemic outbreaks, particularly within Global South megacities where demand for public transport is high and reduced access can exacerbate socio-economic inequalities. This study focuses on Metro Manila - a characteristic megacity that experienced one of the most stringent lockdowns worldwide. It analyzes aggregated cell phone and GPS data from Google and Apple that provide a comprehensive representation of mobility behavior before and during the lockdown. While significant decreases are observed for all transport modes, public transport experienced the largest drop (-74.5 %, on average). The study demonstrates that: (i) those most reliant on public transport were disproportionately affected by lockdowns; (ii) public transport was unable to fulfil its role as public service; and, (iii) this drove a paradigm shift towards active mobility. Moving forwards, in the short-term policymakers must promote active mobility and prioritize public transport to reduce unequal access to transport. Longer-term, policymakers must leverage the increased active transport to encourage modal shift via infrastructure investment, and better utilize big data to support decision-making.
In Germany, the number of renewable energy prosumers has increased rapidly since 2000. However, the development of prosumers has faced and will continue to face various economic, social, and technological challenges, which have triggered the emergence of a number of innovative business models (BM). This paper enriches the empirical basis for prosumer-oriented BMs by investigating two BM innovations in Germany (P2P electricity trading and aggregation of small-size prosumers) drawing on business model and socio-technical transition theories. A mix of qualitative data collection methods, including document analysis and semi-structured expert interviews, was applied. We found that while both BMs can potentially address the challenges associated with renewable energy prosumer development in Germany, small-scale prosumers’ participation in both BMs has been limited so far. We identified various internal and external drivers and barriers for scaling up these BMs for prosumer development in Germany. Despite these barriers, both aggregation and centralized P2P targeting prosumers may potentially be also taken up by incumbent market actors such as utilities. Decentralized P2P on the other hand still faces significant internal and external barriers for upscaling. Based on the analysis, the paper provides policy recommendations with respect to the identified drivers and barriers. From a theoretical perspective, our findings provide further evidence to challenge the dichotomous understanding of niche actors and incumbents, the latter of which are often theorized to be resistant to radical innovations.
Rising energy costs have led to increased discussion about the social impact of the energy transition in Germany in recent years. In 2021, a gradually increasing CO2 tax was introduced. This paper analyzes the question of whether a CO2 tax can be socially just. Using data analysis and desk research, correlations between income and energy consumption in Germany are shown. In a short analysis, it is investigated which additional burdens different types of private households have to expect in the coming years due to the introduction of CO2 pricing on energy. In particular, the introduction of a per capita flat rate fed by CO2 tax revenues could be a suitable way to reduce the burden on low-income households.
German electricity giants have recently taken high-level decisions to remove selected fossil fuel operations from their company portfolio. This new corporate strategy could be seen as a direct response to the growing global influence of the fossil fuel divestment campaign. In this paper we ask whether the divestment movement currently exerts significant influence on decision-making at the top four German energy giants - E.On, RWE, Vattenfall and EnBW. We find that this is not yet the case. After describing the trajectory of the global fossil fuel divestment campaign, we outline four alternative influences on corporate strategy that, currently, are having a greater impact than the divestment movement on Germany's power sector. In time, however, clear political decisions and strong civil support may increase the significance of climate change concerns in the strategic management of the German electricity giants.
The Global Stocktake (GST) takes a central role within the architecture of the Paris Agreement, with many hoping that it will become a catalyst for increased mitigation ambition. This paper outlines four governance functions for an ideal GST: pacemaker, ensurer of accountability, driver of ambition and provider of guidance and signal. The GST can set the pace of progress by stimulating and synchronizing policy processes across governance levels. It can ensure accountability of Parties through transparency and public information sharing. Ambition can be enhanced through benchmarks for action and transformative learning. By reiterating and refining the long term visions, it can echo and amplify the guidance and signal provided by the Paris Agreement. The paper further outlines preconditions for the effective performance of these functions. Process-related conditions include: a public appraisal of inputs; a facilitative format that can develop specific recommendations; high-level endorsement to amplify the message and effectively inform national climate policy agendas; and an appropriate schedule, especially with respect to the transparency framework. Underlying information provided by Parties complemented with other (scientific) sources needs to enable benchmark setting for collective climate action, to allow for transparent assessments of the state of emissions and progress of a low-carbon transformation. The information also needs to be politically relevant and concrete enough to trigger enhancement of ambition. We conclude that meeting these conditions would enable an ideal GST and maximize its catalytic effect.
As investors and financial intermediaries, private banks are increasingly confronted with climate change concerns. But to what extent do banks identify as the changemakers driving climate alignment forward? To advance this question, this paper analyzes the South African banking sector with a specific focus on Standard Bank and Nedbank as exemplary case studies. Relying on the concept of "climate mainstreaming", we critically assess the banks' annual reports and compare their self-portrayal with publicly available sources on the bank's business practices, chiefly provided by non-governmental organizations and media. We find that Nedbank pushes a holistic narrative of climate change as an inevitable business opportunity. Standard Bank, in turn, relies on a "narrative of balance" between climate change and other profit-oriented investments to safeguard its stakes in the fossil industry. In so doing, this paper sheds light on greenwashing practices within disclosure specifically and the lack of binding corporate regulation more generally.
On the one hand, a large number of companies have committed to achieve net zero emissions and many of them foresee to offset some remaining emissions with carbon credits, suggesting a surge of future demand. Yet, the supply side of the voluntary carbon market is struggling to align its business model with the new legal architecture of the Paris Agreement. This article juxtaposes these two perspectives. It provides an overview of the plans of 482 major companies with some form of neutrality/net zero pledge and traces the struggle on the supply side of the voluntary carbon market to come up with a viable business model that ensures environmental integrity and contributes to achieving the objectives of the Paris Agreement. Our analysis finds that if carbon credits are used to offset remaining emissions against neutrality objectives, these credits need to be accounted against the host countries' Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to ensure environmental integrity. Yet, operationalizing this approach is challenging and will require innovative solutions and political support.
Key policy insights:
There is a growing mismatch between the faith placed in carbon credits by private sector companies and the continued quest for a common position of the main suppliers of the voluntary carbon market.
The voluntary carbon market has not yet found a way to align itself with the new legal architecture of the Paris Agreement in a credible and legitimate way.
Public policy support at the national and international level will be needed to operationalize a robust approach for the market’s future activities.
There is a growing body of scientific evidence supporting sufficiency as an inevitable strategy for mitigating climate change. Despite this, sufficiency plays a minor role in existing climate and energy policies. Following previous work on the National Energy and Climate Plans of EU countries, we conduct a similar content analysis of the recommendations made by citizen assemblies on climate change mitigation in ten European countries and the EU, and compare the results of these studies. Citizen assemblies are representative mini-publics and enjoy a high level of legitimacy.
We identify a total of 860 mitigation policy recommendations in the citizen assemblies' documents, of which 332 (39 %) include sufficiency. Most of the sufficiency policies relate to the mobility sector, the least relate to the buildings sector. Regulatory instruments are the most often proposed means for achieving sufficiency, followed by fiscal and economic instruments. The average approval rate of sufficiency policies is high (93 %), with the highest rates for regulatory policies.
Compared to National Energy and Climate Plans, the citizen assembly recommendations include a significantly higher share of sufficiency policies (factor three to six) with a stronger focus on regulatory policies. Consequently, the recommendations can be interpreted as a call for a sufficiency turn and a regulatory turn in climate mitigation politics. These results suggest that the observed lack of sufficiency in climate policy making is not due to a lack of legitimacy, but rather reflects a reluctance to implement sufficiency policies, the constitution of the policy making process and competing interests.
Cleaner vehicles
(2016)
This review of sources has assessed existing evidence for economic benefits arising from innovations or interventions that aim to improve the environmental performance of vehicles - such as enhancements to engine and vehicle technologies or improved fuels. It is designed to support cities in their decision making and measure selection process. The article is one of 22 reviews published in this volume.
This paper examines the Global Climate Action Agenda (GCAA) and discusses options to improve sub- and non-state involvement in post-2020 climate governance. A framework that stimulates sub- and non-state action is a necessary complement to national governmental action, as the latter falls short of achieving low-carbon and climate-resilient development as envisaged in the Paris Agreement. Applying design principles for an ideal-type orchestration framework, we review literature and gather expert judgements to assess whether the GCAA has been collaborative, comprehensive, evaluative and catalytic. Results show that there has been greater coordination among orchestrators, for instance in the organization of events. However, mobilization efforts remain event-driven and too little effort is invested in understanding the progress of sub- and non-state action. Data collection has improved, although more sophisticated indicators are needed to evaluate climate and sustainable development impacts. Finally, the GCAA has recorded more action, but relatively little by actors in developing countries. As the world seeks to recover from the COVID-19 crisis and enters a new decade of climate action, the GCAA could make a vital contribution in challenging times by helping governments keep and enhance climate commitments; strengthening capacity for sub- and non-state action; enabling accountability; and realizing sustainable development.
The Paris Agreement marks a milestone in international climate policy. Though, the positive appraisal was not unanimous. This article will argue that the Paris Agreement embraces a new paradigm. Climate change is no longer seen as a clear-cut environmental problem, nor as a developmental issue, but as a challenge to fundamentally transform global societies. While criticism through the lens of the former paradigms is worthwhile, the Paris Agreement should be acknowledged as a pacemaker for the transformation processes that lay ahead of us.
Purpose - This paper sets out to tackle the issue of climate change from a business perspective. It seeks to discuss why it is important to take climate change considerations into account in business decisions, how this can be done and what further action is required from managers and business scholars.
Design/methodology/approach - The paper describes ways of reducing emissions and adapting to climate change that can be implemented by any business. As an illustration, the proposed climate strategy of a large European utility company, RWE, is provided.
Findings - There are numerous ways to reduce emissions within business operations, along the supply chain and surrounding product usage and disposal. Climate-proofing operations is also becoming increasingly pertinent to businesses.
Research limitations/implications - New ways have to be found yet in order to take emission reductions to a more ambitious level by altering patterns of production and consumption.
Practical implications - The paper discusses how businesses can reduce their carbon footprint and anticipate changes in the physical and political environment related to climate change.
Originality/value - The paper is of value to managers who, today, are expected not only to reduce emissions from operations, but also to gain an awareness of the physical, political and social risks stemming from the impacts of climate change.
As of June 2017, 150 countries have ratified the Paris Climate Agreement. This agreement calls for, among other things, strong reductions in CO2 emissions by 2030 and beyond. This paper reviews the Nationally Determined Contribution (NDCs) plans of six Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries and compares their current and projected future CO2 levels across sectors, and their stated targets in the context of their economic and demographic situations. This comparison reveals wide variations in the types of targets, with the "ambition" level changing as the perspective changes from total CO2 to CO2/capita and per unit gross domestic product (GDP). We also review national plans as stated in NDCs and find that while there are many types of policies listed, few are quantified and no attempts are made to score individual or groups of policies for their likelihood in achieving stated targets. We conclude that more analysis is needed to better understand the possible impacts of current policies and plans on CO2 emissions, and whether current plans are adequate to hit targets. Considerations on better aligning targets are also provided.
2020 was meant to be the year of climate ambition. Then the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the Glasgow conference was postponed to November 2021, and climate policy generally appeared to have been put on the backburner. But towards the end of the year prospects seemed to brighten with a series of zero-emission pledges and the election of Joe Biden as US President. This article analyses what the year of the pandemic achieved in terms of combating climate change. This article first summarizes the virtual events that were organised to substitute for the physical UNFCCC conferences and what progress was or was not made on the outstanding items of the "Paris rulebook", implementation of the Gender Action Plan, and other items. Subsequently, the article surveys the status of NDC updates and to what extent recovery programmes have been used to advance climate action. Finally, the article takes a closer look at the current dynamics among non-Party actors. In summary, while formal negotiations essentially stopped in the year of the pandemic, the conservation did not. However, implementation is still lagging far behind the ambitious targets that have been set. While implementation is mostly the domain of national policy, the international process has a number of options at its disposal to foster climate action.
This paper analyses the results of the climate conference in Lima 2014 in the light of the coming climate summit in Paris by the end of this year (COP21). The authors from the Wuppertal Institute make recommendations for the improvement of the current cooperation in the context of the climate convention and they suggest to complement the existing UN regime with a club of forerunner countries in order to provide new breath for international climate policy.
Biomass-fueled combined heat and power systems (CHPs) can potentially offer environmental benefits compared to conventional separate production technologies. This study presents the first environmental life cycle assessment (LCA) of a novel high-efficiency bio-based power (HBP) technology, which combines biomass gasification with a 199 kW solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) to produce heat and electricity. The aim is to identify the main sources of environmental impacts and to assess the potential environmental performance compared to benchmark technologies. The use of various biomass fuels and alternative allocation methods were scrutinized. The LCA results reveal that most of the environmental impacts of the energy supplied with the HBP technology are caused by the production of the biomass fuel. This contribution is higher for pelletized than for chipped biomass. Overall, HBP technology shows better environmental performance than heat from natural gas and electricity from the German/European grid. When comparing the HBP technology with the biomass-fueled ORC technology, the former offers significant benefits in terms of particulate matter (about 22 times lower), photochemical ozone formation (11 times lower), acidification (8 times lower) and terrestrial eutrophication (about 26 times lower). The environmental performance was not affected by the allocation parameter (exergy or economic) used. However, the tested substitution approaches showed to be inadequate to model multiple environmental impacts of CHP plants under the investigated context and goal.
This paper investigates the multimodal nature of urban congestion and network performance, with the aim of developing practice ready policy tools to alleviate the adverse effects of excess demand, no matter in which mode it realizes. As part of the efforts to get an overall understanding of how congestion is defined in various disciplines, we conduct a literature review of relevant engineering and microeconomics studies. The investigation reveals the main areas where contradiction can be identified between engineering and economics approaches. In a second step, we investigate the results of an expert survey about the principles of congestion analysis from a multimodal perspective. The main contribution of the paper is twofold. First, we draw attention to the pitfalls of oversimplified and narrow viewpoints on congestion. Second, we operationalize these principles in order to enable decision makers to assess the impact of urban transport measures on congestion.
As the recent withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement has shown, political volatility directly affects climate change mitigation policies, in particular in sectors, such as transport associated with long-term investments by individuals (vehicles) and by local and national governments (urban form and transport infrastructure and services). There is a large potential for cost-effective solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to improve the sustainability of the transport sector that is yet unexploited. Considering the cost-effectiveness and the potential for co-benefits, it is hard to understand why efficiency gains and CO2 emission reductions in the transport sector are still lagging behind this potential. Particularly interesting is the fact that there is substantial difference among countries with relatively similar economic performances in the development of their transport CO2 emissions over the past thirty years despite the fact that these countries had relatively similar access to efficient technologies and vehicles. This study aims to explore some well-established political science theories on the particular example of climate change mitigation in the transport sector in order to identify some of the factors that could help explain the variations in success of policies and strategies in this sector. The analysis suggests that institutional arrangements that contribute to consensus building in the political process provide a high level of political and policy stability which is vital to long-term changes in energy end-use sectors that rely on long-term investments. However, there is no direct correlation between institutional structures, e.g., corporatism and success in reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the transport sector. Environmental objectives need to be built into the consensus-based policy structure before actual policy progress can be observed. This usually takes longer in consensus democracies than in politically more agile majoritarian policy environments, but the policy stability that builds on corporatist institutional structures is likely to experience changes over a longer-term, in this case to a shift towards low-carbon transport that endures.
Last year's conference of the global climate change regime took place from 2 until 15 December 2019 in Madrid, Spain. Despite marking a new record for overtime in the history of the UNFCCC, the conference did not only fail to meet the increasing public demand for swift and strong climate action, it also failed on its formal mandate to finalise the Paris rulebook. A record number of issues were left unresolved and shelved for the next session. COP25 thereby highlighted how much work still lies ahead both domestically and internationally if 2020 is to see a step-up in climate action that is consistent with the long-term goal of the Paris Agreement.
This paper presents the evaluation of a regional energy efficiency programme implemented in two "départements" of France. Électricité de France (EDF), a French energy company, provides refurbishment advice and financial incentives to end-users in the residential sector as well as specific training courses and certification to local installation contractors and building firms. Refurbishment measures analysed in this paper are efficient space heating equipment (condensing boilers, heat pumps and wood stoves or boilers), solar water heating systems and the installation of double-glazed windows. A billing analysis based on a survey of programme participants' energy consumption is used to calculate the energy savings attributed to the programme. In order to receive an economic feedback of this demonstration programme, the evaluation of both saved energy and programme costs is of importance. Detailed knowledge of the programme's cost-effectiveness is essential for EDF to achieve the saving obligations imposed by the French White Certificate scheme at the lowest cost. Results of this evaluation can support the development and implementation of further energy efficiency programmes with similar characteristics in other regions of France. The cost-effectiveness is determined from the perspective of the programme participant and the society as well as the energy company in charge of the programme. All cost and benefit components are calculated in Euro per kilowatt-hour, which allows a direct comparison of levelized costs of conserved energy with the avoidable costs of the energy supply system.
Course change: navigating urban passenger transport toward sustainability through modal shift
(2022)
Staying within the 2 °C (preferably 1.5 °C) limit requires fast and fundamental system changes, also in urban passenger transport. Shifting car traffic to environmentally friendly transport modes is one central strategy to make urban transport more sustainable and climate friendly. However, in most cities car use remains high. Therefore, this paper analyzes what course change is needed regarding direction, scale and speed of change for urban sustainability and climate protection reasons. The paper analyzes the role of modal shift as a strategy in itself and in relation to land-use (avoid) and efficiency (improve) measures. The paper draws on insights from European frontrunning cities and explorative forecasting scenarios calculated with the sophisticated integrated land-use transport model "Ruhr Region 2050". The paper suggests that a significant reduction of urban car use is needed (direction) that roughly equals a fast halving of car use (scale), which has proven feasible under the current socio-political conditions by annual reduction rates of 0.5 to 1.5 percentage points of the trip-based modal share of car use (speed). Significantly reducing car use requires comprehensive and high-intensive measures that go far beyond usual practices. Modal shift measures need to play a crucial role in integrated approaches with land-use (avoid) and efficiency (improve) measures because they have the potential to significantly reduce car use and CO2 emissions and because they can produce comparatively fast effects - which makes modal shift measures first aid approaches to achieve a fast "bending of the curve" of excessive car use and growing CO2 emissions.
Creating statistics for China's building energy consumption using an adapted energy balance sheet
(2019)
China's regular energy statistics does not include the building sector, and data on building energy demand is included in other types of energy consumption in the Energy Balance Sheet (EBS). Therefore data on building energy demand is not collected based on statistics, but rather calculated or estimated by various approaches in China. This study aims at developing and testing China's building energy statistics by applying an adapted EBS. The advantage of the adapted EBS is that statistical data is from the regular statistical system and no additional statistical efforts are needed. The research result shows that the adapted EBS can be included in China regular energy statistical system and can be standardized in a transparent way. Testing of the adapted EBS shows that China's building energy demand has shown an annual increase of 7.6% since 2001, and a lower contribution to the total energy demand as compared to the developed world. There is also a close link to lifestyle and living standard while industrial energy demand is mainly driven by economy and decoupling of building energy demand with increasing of building floor area, this is due to a considerable improvement of building energy efficiency. The adapted EBS creates a method for China conducting statistics of building energy consumption at the sector level in a uniform way and serves as the basis for any sound building energy efficiency policy decisions.
This article analyses the negotiations on the future of the international climate regime at the United Nations Climate Summit in Copenhagen. It also discusses key issues in the ongoing business of implementing the Climate Convention and the Kyoto Protocol. The article lays out the main issues at stake in the negotiations, contrasts divergences in interests amongst negotiating parties, and summarises the results achieved in Copenhagen. The report discusses these results in detail and concludes with an outlook on how the challenges ahead could be overcome.
This paper outlines the key elements of a low-carbon stabilization pathway for land transport, focusing on the potential of key policy measures at the local and national level, opportunities for synergies of sustainable development and climate change objectives, and governance and institutional issues affecting the implementation of measures. It combines several approaches to provide an integrated view on the decarbonization of the transport sector based on recent literature. It will assess the quantitative basis potential climate change mitigation pathways and will then look into policy and institutional aspects that relate to the feasibility of these pathways. This combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis to measure the potential, options, and feasibility of climate change mitigation strategies in the transport sector aims to synthesize recent papers on the subject and draw conclusions for future research.
Decision-making in sustainable urban mobility planning : common practice and future directions
(2015)
The European Commission aims to foster sustainable local transport systems through the concept of "Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans" (SUMPs). This paper is intended as a think piece highlighting the challenges for cities in selecting sustainable and cost-effective transport and mobility measures. Not only does the paper convey an understanding of the challenges of determining a transport project's viability, but it also presents five case studies of sustainable urban mobility planning and the role of project appraisal in those policy-making processes.
India's present development trajectory is at a crucial juncture with a requirement to meet the demands of a population of over 1.2 billion while ensuring environmental sustainability. The resulting economic growth over the past two decades has over-exploited finite natural resources and led to tremendous environmental degradation. Therefore, decoupling economic growth from resource consumption is crucial in the transformation towards a green economy. Building construction is one of the most resource-intensive sectors, as well as creating a high impact on the environment. This study analyzes existing mechanisms in India's building construction sector that attempt to decouple economic growth from resource use and environmental impacts. The key contributors for decoupling are analyzed. Recommendations for regulations, market incentives, transparency, data monitoring and capacity-building are provided for an array of policy initiatives targeted at political and financial decision-makers at the national, state and local levels for different buildings.
Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have decided to establish a "new market-based mechanism" (NMM) to promote mitigation across "broad segments" of developing countries' economies but have so far defined only some broad outlines of how it is to function. This article identifies key design options of the NMM based on a survey of the literature and reviews them against a range of assessment criteria. Furthermore, potential application of the NMM is analysed for five country-sector combinations. The analysis finds that lack of data and of institutions that could manage the NMM are key bottlenecks. In addition, the analysis reveals the existence of substantial no-regret reduction potential, suggesting that sectors may not be sensitive to the market incentives from an NMM. Governmental capacity building and Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs) might be more appropriate in the short term, preparing the ground for the adoption of market-based approaches at a later stage. NMM pilots could be based on supported NAMAs but should ideally generate tradable and compliance-grade emission credits in order to fully simulate the real-life conditions of an NMM.
Policy relevance: The Doha conference identified "possible elements" of the NMM to be addressed in the development of the NMM's modalities and procedures. This article identifies available options for these possible elements and reviews these options against a number of criteria, including environmental effectiveness, economic efficiency, political and administrative efficiency, and others. On this basis the article identifies options that are best suited to fulfil the main aims of the NMM as decided at the Durban conference, "to enhance the cost-effectiveness of, and to promote, mitigation actions". In addition, the article analysis potential application of the NMM for five country-sector combinations. The analysis assesses the emission reduction potential that could be mobilized through the NMM as well as the institutional market readiness of the sectors. Finally, the article synthesizes the challenges ahead for the NMM that have emerged from the analysis and suggests possible ways forward.
An index of accessibility-based vulnerability is created based on a definition of transport-user vulnerability regarding transport accessibility created for the EMPOWER project, in order to assess the project's key performance indicator of the inclusion of vulnerable people in the project's scheme. The objective of the index is to account for various individual vulnerability aspects, but also for the "multi-dimensionality" of vulnerability, i.e. individuals may be vulnerable because of one specific aspect (e.g., disability), or they may be vulnerable because of multiple aspects which, if assessed in isolation, wouldn't classify the individual as vulnerable. Users of the project scheme in the Dutch city of Enschede are surveyed on, inter alia, their vulnerability based on this definition, according to their income, mobility budget, physical mobility, age, gender, living situation, nation of birth, and education. According to individual questions, 1% to 54% (single parents and females, respectively) of respondents have some level of vulnerability. According to the index, 23–36% of respondents can be considered to be vulnerable. Suitably modified for local conditions, the index is relevant to cities, especially quickly developing cities where congestion reduction is or has been a priority, insofar as it offers a way of measuring and monitoring the vulnerability of the users of their transport system. Finally, steps to adapt the index to other settings (cities or countries) are discussed.
This paper explores how the European Commission promotes the concept of Sustainable Urban Mobility Planning (SUMP) among European cities. Despite the strong uptake of the SUMP concept, mobility-related problems persist in European municipalities. Linking theoretical approaches to understand the diffusion of policies with empirical findings from working with cities in the SUMP context, this article explores channels of policy diffusion and investigates shortcomings related to the respective approaches. Studies on the diffusion, the transfer and the convergence of policies identify formal hierarchy, coercion, competition, learning and networking, and the diffusion of international norms as channels for policy transfer. The findings which are presented in this paper are twofold: First, the paper finds evidence that the Commission takes different roles and uses all mechanisms in parallel, albeit with different intensity. It concludes that the approaches to explain policy diffusion are not competing or mutually exclusive but are applied by the same actor to address different aspects of a policy field, or to reach out to different actors. Second, the article provides first evidence of factors that limit the mechanisms' abilities to directly influence urban mobility systems and mobility behaviour.
Apart from the much-debated question of what legal form the 2015 climate agreement is supposed to have, another core issue is the substantive content of countries' commitments. While the climate regime has so far mostly been based on emission targets, literature has identified a broad range of other possible types of mitigation commitments, such as technology targets, emission price commitments, or commitments to specific policies and measures (PAMs). The nationally appropriate mitigation actions (NAMAs) submitted by developing countries under the Cancún Agreements also show a broad range of different forms of participation. This article surveys the possible commitment types that have so far been discussed in literature and in the UNFCCC negotiations and assesses their respective advantages and disadvantages against a set of criteria: environmental effectiveness, cost effectiveness, distributional aspects and institutional feasibility. The article finds that no commitment option provides a silver bullet. All options have several advantages but also disadvantages. The environmentally most effective way forward may lie in pursuing a multi-dimensional approach, combining emission targets with other commitment types to compensate for the drawbacks of the emission-based approach. However, such an approach would also increase complexity, both in terms of the negotiations and in terms of implementation and administration.
Domestic emission trading systems in Non-Annex I countries : state of play and future prospects
(2011)
Since the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the establishment of a harmonised international carbon market has been seen as one of the main strategies in international climate policy. So far, however, the market is far from being globally harmonised or systematically linked. Instead, a mosaic of national and sub-national markets has been under development, differing in timing, location, relationship to the Protocol and their levels of legal commitment.
Nevertheless, creating a global carbon market is a key goal of EU climate policy. As plans for the establishment of emissions trading systems (ETS) emerge in various non-Annex I countries, prospects for linking them to existing systems seem to finally get in reach. We have analysed the prospects of emission trading in non-Annex I countries in a recent paper on behalf of the German environment ministry. In the following we first give a theoretical overview of what design factors need to be taken into account when establishing national emission trading systems. The following elaborates on the status of emissions trading discussion in various non-Annex I countries.
Driving forces of changing environmental pressures from consumption in the European food system
(2020)
The paper provides an integrated assessment of environmental and socio-economic effects arising from final consumption of food products by European households. Direct and indirect effects accumulated along the global supply chain are assessed by applying environmentally extended input-output analysis (EE-IOA). EXIOBASE 3.4 database is used as a source of detailed information on environmental pressures and world input-output transactions of intermediate and final goods and services. An original methodology to produce detailed allocation matrices to link IO data with household expenditure data is presented and applied. The results show a relative decoupling between environmental pressures and consumption over time and shows that European food consumption generates relatively less environmental pressures outside Europe (due to imports) than average European consumption. A methodological framework is defined to analyze the main driving forces by means of a structural decomposition analysis (SDA). The results of the SDA highlight that while technological developments and changes in the mix of consumed food products result in reductions in environmental pressures, this is offset by growth in consumption. The results highlight the importance of directing specific research and policy efforts towards food consumption to support the transition to a more sustainable food system in line with the objectives of the EU Farm to Fork Strategy.
This article aims to analyse the potential for international climate governance to promote the decarbonisation of land transport. It first summarises challenges and barriers that impede the transformation of the sector. On this basis, the article discusses how international governance could potentially assist with overcoming these barriers and mobilising potentials. Subsequently, the article analyses to what extent existing international governance institutions deliver on the potential identified. The analysis finds that while there is a large number of international institutions trying to promote the decarbonisation of land transport, none of them emerge saliently as hubs or core institutions. There is a substantial amount of activity to generate and disseminate knowledge and learning, but the potential for providing guidance and signal, setting rules, providing transparency/accountability and means of implementation could be further exploited. The article concludes with suggestions on how international governance may be strengthened.
The ongoing warming of the Earth's atmosphere is projected to cause a northward shift of species' distributions, as they track their climatic optimum. In the rapidly warming Arctic, this has already led to an increase of shrubs in tundra ecosystems. While this northern expansion of woody biomass has been studied relatively extensively over the last decade, little research has been devoted to shrub growth responses at the southern margins of Northern Hemisphere shrubs. Here, we studied shoot length growth, its responses to climate over the period 2010-2017, and differences in leaf C and N content of the evergreen dwarf shrub Empetrum nigrum, as well as the vegetation composition and soil parameters at four sites located along a gradient of increasing dune age on the island Spiekeroog, northern Germany. The sites are located in the tri-national UNESCO world heritage site, the Wadden Sea. E. nigrum has a predominantly circum-arctic-boreal distribution and its southern distribution margin in European lowlands runs through northern Germany, where it is retreating northwards. We found a negative response to autumn (surface) temperatures and previous summer surface temperatures and/or a positive response to summer precipitation of E. nigrum growth, except at the oldest dune with the strongest E. nigrum dominance. Growth rates and plant species diversity declined with dune age. Our results suggest that E. nigrum growth is drought sensitive at its European southern range margin. We hypothesize that this sensitivity may form the basis for its northward retreat, which is supported by recent observations of E. nigrum dieback in Germany after the extreme drought in 2018 and model projections.
Electric mobility is beginning to enter East African cities. This paper aims to investigate what policy-level solutions and stakeholder constellations are established in the context of electric mobility (e-mobility) in Dar es Salaam, Kigali, Kisumu and Nairobi and in which ways they attempt to tackle the implementation of electric mobility solutions. The study employs two key methods including content analysis of policy and programmatic documents and interviews based on a purposive sampling approach with stakeholders involved in mobility transitions. The study findings point out that in spite of the growing number of policies (specifically in Rwanda and Kenya) and on-the-ground developments, a set of financial and technical barriers persists. These include high upfront investment costs in vehicles and infrastructure, as well as perceived lack of competitiveness with fossil fuel vehicles that constrain the uptake of e-mobility initiatives. The study further indicates that transport operators and their representative associations are less recognized as major players in the transition, far behind new e-mobility players (start-ups) and public authorities. This study concludes by identifying current gaps that need to be tackled by policymakers and stakeholders in order to implement inclusive electric mobility in East African cities, considering modalities that include transport providers and address their financial constraints.
Combining environmental with employment objectives, ecological tax reform (ETR) envisages a double dividend. While research has mainly focused on the socio-economic and environmental impacts of ETR, there is less literature on the social responses. This paper gives an overview and history of German ETR as well as investigating the understanding of perceptions and attitudes towards ETR of those being "subject to tax". The research is based on qualitative social research methods. As with the other PETRAS papers, interviews were conducted with policy-makers and business leaders and focus groups were formed with lay persons. The results show that responses of policy-makers and business leaders are modest. Although some criticisms about the specific design of the German ETR remain, complaints towards ETR are settled. Attitudes appear influenced by more fundamental convictions such as economic interest or altruistic views. In contrast, ETR appears to politicise common people. Attitudes are influenced by the overall comprehension of the ETR concept, the expected impacts, perceived information deficits, as well as a general distrust in politics. Our data show that the linking of environmental and employment objectives is not understood and not welcomed. In order to increase social acceptance, the paper discusses refocusing ETR on environmental objectives, modestly increasing the share of ETR revenue spent for environmental purposes, removing inconsistencies in the ETR design, and improving information policy.
This review of sources has assessed existing evidence for economic benefits arising from activities fostering the use of vehicles that use electricity to power an electric motor. It is designed to support cities in their decision making and measure selection process. The article is one of 22 reviews published in this volume.
Holiday travel behavior, individual characteristics of holiday travelers and strategies to change holiday travel behavior are the subjects of this article. From the environmental perspective, the journey to the destinations is the most critical aspect of traveling. Based on a 2003 survey of 1991 German inhabitants, the kilometers traveled and the choice of transportation mode for holiday purposes have been quantified. According to the number of trips and kilometers traveled, four travel groups have been identified. The groups vary according to socio-demographics, psychological factors, number of holiday trips, and travel mode choice. Persons who traveled to more distant destinations also traveled more often and used air travel for more than 60% of their trips. For the other groups, car travel was more important. Correlating the four travel groups with greenhouse gas emissions reveals that the smallest group - the long-haul travelers - was responsible for 80% of the emissions of the whole sample. Income, education, and openness to change were main indicators of individual greenhouse gas emissions. Target group oriented strategies to reduce the environmental impact of holiday mobility are discussed against the background of 84 in-depth interviews conducted with selected representatives of the first survey.
Although a substantial economic energy saving potential exists in the residential sector of the European Union, the energy efficiency service (EES) market is much less developed in this market segment than in other demand sectors (e.g. the industry or the public/service sector).
This paper presents an analysis of the current situation and existing potentials for future expansion. A specific analysis methodology has been developed and applied by a research consortium in 18 EU countries. This methodology has mostly built upon an extensive review of the existing literature and on interviews of a large number of acknowledged experts. Its application has allowed identifying encouraging development trends in specific market segments where the possibility of aggregating the EES demand or of exploiting good relationships with customers have created interesting investment opportunities. These trends have been observed in particular in Germany, Denmark, France, Flanders (BE), Hungary, Romania and UK. The assessment performed has also allowed discussing a series of strategies and policy measures that can be adopted to overcome existing barriers to market development. The general conclusion drawn in the paper is that energy efficiency policies supporting EES markets in the residential sector are highly needed. Although EU policies have typically a limited direct impact, they can increase trust into EESs and EES providers. At the national level, a stronger collaboration of governments or local administrations with banks to finance EESs is still very necessary in many EU countries.
Energy for transport
(2014)
Global transportation energy use is steeply rising, mainly as a result of increasing population and economic activity. Petroleum fuels remain the dominant energy source, reflecting advantages such as high energy density, low cost, and market availability. The movement of people and freight makes a major contribution to economic development and social well-being, but it also negatively impacts climate change, air quality, health, social cohesion, and safety. Following a review published 20 years ago in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources (then named the Annual Review of Energy and the Environment) by Lee Schipper, we examine current trends and potential futures, revising several major global transport/energy reports. There are significant opportunities to slow travel growth and improve efficiency. Alternatives to petroleum exist but have different characteristics in terms of availability, cost, distribution, infrastructure, storage, and public acceptability. The transition to low-carbon equitable and sustainable transport will take time but can be fostered by numerous short- and medium-term strategies that would benefit energy security, health, productivity, and sustainability.
Studies show that people can tolerate elevated temperatures in the presence of appreciable air movement (e.g., from using ceiling fans). This minimises the use of air-conditioners and extends their set-point temperature (Tset), resulting in energy savings in space cooling. However, there is little empirical evidence on the energy savings from using ceiling fans with Room Air-Conditioners (RACs). To address this gap, we analysed the energy performance of RACs with both fixed-speed compressors and inverter technology at different set-point temperatures and ceiling fan speed settings in 15 residential Mixed-Mode Buildings (MMBs) in India. Thermal comfort conditions (as predicted by the Indian Model for Adaptive Comfort-Residential (IMAC-R)) with minimum energy consumption were maintained at a set-point temperature (𝑇set) of 28 and 30 C and a fan speed setting of one. Compared with a Tset of 24 °C, a 𝑇set of 28 and 30 °C resulted in energy savings of 44 and 67%, respectively. With the use of RACs, a configuration with a minimum fan speed was satisfactory for an optimal use of energy and for maintaining the conditions of thermal comfort. In addition, RACs with inverter technology used 34-68% less energy than fixed-speed compressors. With the rising use of RACs, particularly in tropical regions, the study's outcomes offer a significant potential for reducing space-cooling energy consumption and the resultant greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
Energy sufficiency has recently gained increasing attention as a way to limit and reduce total energy consumption of households and overall. This paper presents both the partly new methods and the results of a comprehensive analysis of a micro- and meso-level energy sufficiency policy package to make electricity use in the home more sufficient and reduce at least the growth in per-capita dwelling size. The objective is to find out how policy can support households and their members, as individuals or as caregivers, but also manufacturers and local authorities in practicing energy sufficiency. This analysis needed an adapted and partly new set of methods we developed. Energy sufficiency does not only face barriers like energy efficiency, but also potential restrictions for certain household members or characteristics, and sometimes, preconditions have to be met to make more energy-sufficient routines and practices possible. All of this was analysed in detail to derive recommendations for which policy instruments need to be combined to an effective policy package for energy sufficiency. Energy efficiency and energy sufficiency should not be seen as opposed to each other but work in the same direction - saving energy. Therefore, some energy sufficiency policy instruments may be the same as for energy efficiency, such as energy pricing policies. Some may simply adapt technology-specific energy efficiency policy instruments. Examples include progressive appliance efficiency standards, standards based on absolute consumption, or providing energy advice. However, sufficiency may also require new policy approaches. They may range from promotion of completely different services for food and clothes cleaning, to instruments for limiting average dwelling floor area per person, or to a cap-and-trade system for the total electricity sales of a supplier to its customers, instead of an energy efficiency obligation.
Grave concerns with the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) have increasingly surfaced in the international climate policy arena. The sectoral approaches described in this paper may be a way to address some of the shortcomings of this Kyoto mechanism. The paper outlines the criticisms that have been raised against the CDM as well as the conflicting interpretations of a sectoral approach and examines in how far it might resolve the mechanism’s perceived shortcomings. Furthermore, it outlines issues that need to be resolved when implementing a sectoral approach: distributing costs and benefits, defining the sector and its baseline, ensuring additionality and tackling procedural issues. A sectoral approach can enable countries to guide their structural development but it also opens up a gap between public and private investment that needs to be addressed before conflicts arise. Sectoral CDM activities may be able to lower transaction costs for projects that otherwise cannot compete in the CDM market and might even pave the way to sectoral greenhouse gas limitation targets in developing countries by establishing the necessary infrastructure for data collection. However, a sectoral CDM cannot be mistaken for a panacea. Some of the mechanism's problems remain, which highlights the need to establish additional instruments to support Southern countries in furthering sustainable development and embarking on a low-emission trajectory.
Energy sufficiency is one of the three energy sustainability strategies, next to energy efficiency and renewable energies. We analyse to what extent European governments follow this strategy, by conducting a systematic document analysis of all available European National Energy and Climate Plans (NECPs) and Long-Term Strategies (LTSs). We collect and categorise a total of 230 sufficiency-related policy measures, finding large differences between countries. We find most sufficiency policies in the transport sector, when classifying also modal shift policies to change the service quality of transport as sufficiency policies. Types of sufficiency policy instruments vary considerably from sector to sector, for instance the focus on financial incentives and fiscal instruments in the mobility sector, information in the building sector, and financial incentive/tax instruments in cross-sectoral application. Regulatory instruments currently play a minor role for sufficiency policy in the national energy and climate plans of EU member states. Similar to energy efficiency in recent decades, sufficiency still largely referred to as micro-level individual behaviour change or necessary exogenous trends that will need to take place. It is not treated yet as a genuine field of policy action to provide the necessary framework for enabling societal change.
This paper examines the current and prospective greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of e-fuels produced via electrolysis and Fischer-Tropsch synthesis (FTS) for the years 2021, 2030, and 2050 for use in Germany. The GHG emissions are determined by a scenario approach as a combination of a literature-based top-down and bottom-up approach. Considered process steps are the provision of feedstocks, electrolysis (via solid oxide co-electrolysis; SOEC), synthesis (via Fischer-Tropsch synthesis; FTS), e-crude refining, eventual transport to, and use in Germany. The results indicate that the current GHG emissions for e-fuel production in the exemplary export countries Saudi Arabia and Chile are above those of conventional fuels. Scenarios for the production in Germany lead to current GHG emissions of 2.78-3.47 kgCO2-eq/L e-fuel in 2021 as the reference year and 0.064-0.082 kgCO2-eq/L e-fuel in 2050. With a share of 58-96%, according to the respective scenario, the electrolysis is the main determinant of the GHG emissions in the production process. The use of additional renewable energy during the production process in combination with direct air capture (DAC) are the main leverages to reduce GHG emissions.
The current emissions trading debates in the EU and the USA were examined and the prospects for creating a transatlantic carbon market were analysed. A future US Emissions Trading Scheme (US ETS) may be designed very differently from the EU ETS, raising questions of compatibility. Crucial differences relate to the stringency of targets, the recognition of offsets, and price control mechanisms. These differences flow directly from the different policy and economic perspectives on emissions trading and climate policy in the USA and the EU. The two sides should therefore seek a way forward that reconciles potentially different climate policies. For example, the USA and the EU should consider an effort to harmonize carbon prices, and US legislation could phase out cost-containment mechanisms after some time period. Finally, both US and EU policies should have mechanisms that allow periodic recalibration, which would allow each to adjust to new technology, react to developing-country climate policies, and learn from each other. In the longer term, this would allow both sides to strive for greater policy convergence, either through linked trading systems, harmonized prices, or a transition from harmonized prices to linkage.
The article introduces and exemplifies the approach of evidence-based narratives (EBN). The methodology is a product of co-design between policy-making and science, generating robust intelligence for evidence-based policy-making in the Directorate General for Research and Innovation of the European Commission (DG RTD) under the condition of high uncertainty and fragmented evidence. The EBN transdisciplinary approach tackles practical problems of future-oriented policy-making, in this case in the area of programming for research and innovation addressing the Grand Societal Challenge related to climate change and natural resources. Between 2013 and 2018, the EU-funded RECREATE project developed 20 EBNs in a co-development process between scientists and policy-makers. All EBNs are supported with evidence about the underlying innovation system applying the technological innovation systems (TIS) framework. Each TIS analysis features the innovation, its current state of market diffusion and a description of the innovation investment case. Indicators include potential future market sizes, effects on employment and environmental and social benefits. Based on the innovation and TIS function analyses, the EBNs offer policy recommendations. The article ends with a critical discussion of the EBN approach.
Expenditure-based indicators of energy poverty : an analysis of income and expenditure elasticities
(2021)
Energy poverty is high up on national and European Union policy agendas. A number of possible indicators to measure the issue have been identified in the literature, but comparable data with European coverage is scarce. The EU Commission thus proposes four independent indicators on the "EU Energy Poverty Observatory" based on self-reported items from the pan-European surveys on income and living conditions (SILC) and household budgets (HBS). It is of increasing public interest to analyse social impacts of energy policies, and quantify energy poverty indicators also from modelling. This paper first shortly outlines how the expenditure-based indicators using HBS micro data may be directly linked to existing macroeconomic models through their defining variables (energy expenditure and income). As endogenous modelling based on micro data is difficult, the link may be country-specific elasticities. The main contribution of the paper is a systematic in-depth sensitivity analysis of the two indicators to changes in income and energy expenditure following varying patterns in the underlying distributions of the micro data. The results may be used by future soft links to models. The results display sometimes counterintuitive effects. We find that whether these indicators increase/decrease after a change of income or energy expenditure largely depends on the specific country-wise income and energy expenditure distribution between households on a micro-level. Due to their definition, the examined indicators are especially sensitive, when income changes alter the indicator threshold values, which in these cases are the median values in underlying distributions. We discuss these findings and relate them to several indicator shortcomings and potential remedies through changes in indicator definition.
There is a large potential for cost-effective solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to improve the sustainability of the transport sector that is yet unexploited. Considering the cost-effectiveness and the potential for co-benefits, it is hard to understand why energy gains and mitigation action in the transport sector is still lagging behind the potential. Particularly interesting is the fact that there is substantial difference among countries with relatively similar economic performances, such as the OECD countries in the development of their transport CO2 emission over the past thirty years despite the fact that these countries had relatively similar access to efficient technologies and vehicles. This study aims to apply some well established political science theories on the particular example of climate change mitigation in the transport sector in order to identify some of the factors that could help explain the variations in success of policies and strategies in this sector. The analysis suggests that institutional arrangements that contribute to consensus building in the political process provide a high level of political and policy stability which is vital to long-term changes in energy end-use sectors that rely on long-term investments. However, there is no direct correlation between institutional structures, e.g. corporatism and success in reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the transport sector. Environmental objectives need to be built into the consensus-based policy structure before actual policy progress can be observed. This usually takes longer in consensus democracies than in politically more agile majoritarian policy environments, but the policy stability that builds on corporatist institutional structures is likely to experience changes over a longer-term, in this case to a shift towards low-carbon transport that endures.
The rise of pedal-assisted bicycles (e-bikes) has the potential to contribute to reducing ubiquitous automobility and its negative externalities on the global climate, mobility justice and the quality of urban life. But what makes this new practice so successful in recruiting new practitioners? What policies can ensure that e-bikes are used in a wide range of situations, thus substituting as much car driving as possible - or even reducing the number of cars? The study focuses on commuting as this use case frequently entails the main obstacles to e-biking in daily routines (e.g., sweat, weather, transporting children or goods). The analysis is primarily based on interviews with practitioners and initially provides a thorough depiction of the practice elements (meanings, materials and competences) involved in e-bike commuting. It furthermore elicits key drivers of and barriers to daily e-bike commuting, points to a number of elements that are important to overcome these barriers and develops two tangible policy approaches to foster the substitution of e-biking for car driving.
The gap between the internationally agreed climate objectives and tangible emissions reductions looms large. We explore how the supreme decision-making body of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Conference of the Parties (COP), could develop to promote more effective climate policy. We argue that promoting implementation of climate action could benefit from focusing more on individual sectoral systems, particularly for mitigation. We consider five key governance functions of international institutions to discuss how the COP and the sessions it convenes could advance implementation of the Paris Agreement: guidance and signal, rules and standards, transparency and accountability, means of implementation, and knowledge and learning. In addition, we consider the role of the COP and its sessions as mega-events of global climate policy. We identify opportunities for promoting sectoral climate action across all five governance functions and for both the COP as a formal body and the COP sessions as conducive events. Harnessing these opportunities would require stronger involvement of national ministries in addition to the ministries of foreign affairs and environment that traditionally run the COP process, as well as stronger involvement of non-Party stakeholders within formal COP processes.
This paper analyses India's participation in more than two decades of global climate politics. India has transitioned from a protest voice on the fringes of global climate policy to one that is actively shaping international efforts to combat climate change. Analysis of the drivers behind India's negotiating positions on climate change thus far has focused on the competing motives of equity and co-benefits, which has however been insufficient to explain some of India's recent actions in global climate governance. There is a gap in the literature with regards to the analysis of Indian climate policy as situated in its larger foreign policy agenda and objectives. This paper studies the evolution of India's climate policy through the perspective of its broader foreign policy strategy, arguing that India's engagement with international climate politics can be better understood by locating its climate policy as a subset of its foreign policy agenda. Shifts in India's climate change negotiation stance in the past decade have been but a part of its overall foreign policy adjustments in favour of greater responsibility in management of the global commons. Going forward, tracking Indian foreign policy objectives will yield vital clues towards India’s role in global climate action.
In the long term, any definition of adequacy consistent with UNFCCC Article 2 will require increased mitigation efforts from almost all countries. Therefore, an expansion of emission limitation commitments will form a central element of any future architecture of the climate regime. This expansion has two elements: deepening of quantitative commitments for Annex B countries and the adoption of commitments for those countries outside of the current limitation regime. This article seeks to provide a more analytical basis for further differentiation among non-Annex I countries. To be both fair and reflective of national circumstances, it is based on the criteria of responsibility, capability and potential to mitigate. Altogether, non-Annex I countries were differentiated in four groups, each including countries with similar national circumstances: newly industrialized countries (NICs), rapidly industrializing countries (RIDCs), ‘other developing countries’, and least developed countries (LDCs). Based on the same criteria that were used for differentiating among non-Annex I countries, a set of decision rules was developed to assign mitigation and financial transfer commitments to each group of countries (including Annex I countries). Applying these decision rules results in (strict) reduction commitments for Annex I countries, but also implies quantifiable mitigation obligations for NICs and RIDCs, assisted by financial transfers from the North. Other developing countries are obliged to take qualitative commitments, but quantifiable mitigation commitments for these countries and the LDC group would be not justifiable. As national circumstances in countries evolve over time, the composition of the groups will change according to agreed triggers.
Managing energy use by municipalities should be an important part of local energy and climate policy. The ISO 50001 standard constitutes an internationally recognized catalogue of requirements for systematic energy management. Currently, this standard is mostly implemented by companies. Our study presents an approach where consultants supported 28 European municipalities in establishing energy management systems. A majority (71%) of these municipalities had achieved ISO 50001 certification by the end of our study. We also conducted two surveys to learn more about motivations and challenges when it comes to establishing municipal energy management systems. We found that organizational challenges and resource constraints were the most important topics in this regard. Based on the experiences in our study we present lessons learned regarding supporting municipalities in establishing energy management systems.
Global climate
(2010)
The fifteenth Conference of the Parties (COP 15) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the fifth Conference of the Parties serving as Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP 5) took place on 7–18 December 2010 in Copenhagen. According to the "Bali Action Plan", the "roadmap" of the negotiations agreed at COP 13/CMP 3 in Bali in 2007, the Copenhagen conference was to deliver a comprehensive agreed outcome on the future climate regime. Meeting this deadline was of urgency not only because of the ever more alarming messages from climate science, but also because the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. As ratification of a new agreement can be expected to take at least two years, a timely agreement on post-2012 emission targets is needed to prevent a "gap" after 2012. Expectations were high as more than 100 Heads of State and Government had announced their attendance and more than 40,000 participants had registered their names.
However, despite a record number of five preparatory meetings over the course of 2009, the fundamental differences between Parties proved to be too difficult to overcome. The main outcome of the conference, the "Copenhagen Accord", is only a political declaration, and even this declaration was not supported by all countries. In addition, Parties agreed to continue negotiations into 2010.
Global climate
(2017)
On 7-18 November, the twenty-second Conference of the Parties (COP-22) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the twelfth Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP-12) took place in Marrakech. Due to the rapid entry into force of the Paris Agreement, Marrakech also hosted the first Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement (CMA-1). Nobody had expected this one year before in Paris - the entry into force of the Kyoto Protocol, by comparison, had taken eight years. Many hailed the rapid entry into force as further proof of the commitment of the world community to finally tackle the climate problem.
Global climate
(2013)
This report lays out the major developments in Durban and assesses the main outcomes. It is structured along the Bali roadmap for a future climate agreement that was agreed at the Bali climate conference in 2007. The Bali roadmap comprises negotiations under two tracks. First, the Ad Hoc Working Group on Further Commitments by Annex I Countries under the Kyoto Protocol (AWG-KP), established at the conference in Montreal in 2005, has been negotiating future emission targets for developed countries (listed in Annex I of the United Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and hence called Annex I countries). As the Kyoto Protocol's first commitment period expires in 2012, the AWG-KP is to agree on new targets for a second commitment period post-2012 as well as associated rules for accounting emissions. Second, the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention (AWG-LCA) has also been negotiating commitments for Annex I countries, intending to cover those that have not ratified the Protocol - that is, the USA. In addition, the LCA negotiates "Nationally appropriate mitigation actions" of developing countries, which are to be supported by Annex I countries with technology, financing and capacity-building. Both the actions and the support are to be "measurable, reportable and verifiable". The LCA also negotiates how such support for developing countries' mitigation actions may be delivered as well as how developing countries may be supported in adapting to the impacts of climate change.
Global climate
(2014)
In what has become normal procedure at the international climate negotiations, the 2013 United Nations climate conference in Warsaw (the nineteenth Conference of the Parties (COP 19) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the ninth Conference of Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP 9)) once again seemed on the brink of collapse and concluded more than one day behind schedule, in the evening of Saturday 23 November 2013. However, on most of the key issues it made only scant progress.
This report lays out the main developments in Warsaw and assesses the main outcomes. It starts with the discussions under the Durban Platform on developing a new comprehensive climate agreement by 2015 and increasing short-term ambition and subsequently covers the issues relating to near-term implementation of previous decisions in the areas of emission reductions and transparency, adaptation, loss and damage, finance and technology.
Global climate
(2017)
On 12 December, the twenty-first Conference of Parties (COP-21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) adopted the Paris Agreement. This marked the conclusion of the long process of crafting a new international climate regime that began with the adoption of the Bali Roadmap in 2007, failed spectacularly in Copenhagen in 2009, and resumed with a new approach in Durban 2011. This article summarizes and analyzes the main contents of the Paris Agreement.
Global climate
(2011)
The article discusses the process and outcomes along the central "building blocks" of the negotiations. According to the Bali Action Plan, the negotiations are proceeding under two tracks. First, the "Ad Hoc Working Group on Further Commitments by Annex I Countries under the Kyoto Protocol (AWG-KP)", which was established at CMP 1 in Montreal in 2005, is negotiating future emission targets for industrialised countries (listed in Annex I of the UNFCCC). Second, while the "Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention (AWG-LCA)" also negotiates commitments for Annex I countries, in practice this was originally deemed to relate in particular to those that have not ratified the Protocol - that is, the USA. In addition, the AWG-LCA negotiates "nationally appropriate mitigation actions (NAMAs)" of developing countries, which are to be supported and enabled by industrialised countries through technology, financing and capacity building. Both the NAMAs and the support are to be undertaken in a measurable, reportable and verifiable manner. Finally, the AWG-LCA negotiates ways to enhance adaptation efforts of developing countries, which are also to be financially and technologically supported by industrialised countries.
Global climate
(2013)
The eighteenth Conference of the Parties (COP 18) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the ninth Conference of Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP 8) came to a close in the evening of 8 December 2012. This report lays out the main developments in Doha and assesses the main outcomes. The first chapter outlines the overall situation coming into Doha. The subsequent chapters cover the negotiations on the future of the Kyoto Protocol, the discussions under the Durban Platform on developing a new comprehensive climate agreement by 2015 and increasing short-term ambition, and further near-term action under the UNFCCC.
Global climate
(2008)
Global climate
(2016)
This article summarises the main outcomes of the Lima UN Climate Conference (COP20 / CMP10). It starts with the discussions under the Durban Platform on developing a new comprehensive climate agreement and increasing short-term ambition and subsequently covers the issues relating to near-term implementation of previous decisions in the areas of transparency, reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, loss and damage, adaptation, finance, and carbon markets.
Global climate
(2020)
The annual Climate Change Conference took place on 2-15 December in Katowice, Poland. It included the twenty-fourth Conference of the Parties (COP-24) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the fourteenth Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (MOP-14), the resumed first Meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement (MOP-1), and their subsidiary bodies. The conference had two main objectives: operationalizing the Paris Agreement by adopting detailed rules for its implementation and starting the process of strengthening the parties' climate protection contributions.
Global climate
(2019)
The twenty-third Conference of the Parties (COP-23) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was held in Bonn on 6-17 November 2017, under the presidency of Fiji. COP-23 focused, in particular, on developing rules to implement the 2015 Paris Agreement and on raising ambition for climate protection. Since this was the first "Oceanic" COP, special attention was given to supporting the countries of the Global South in their efforts to reduce emissions, adapt to climate change, and deal with the unavoidable impacts of climate change. This article summarizes the main developments and results of COP-23.
Better integration of climate action and sustainable development can help enhance the ambition of the next nationally determined contributions, as well as implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Governments should use this year as an opportunity to emphasize the links between climate and sustainable development.
Governance policies for a "just transition" : a case study in the Rhineland lignite mining district
(2022)
This paper develops policy measures for a "just transition" based on a case study conducted in Germany's Rhineland lignite mining district. Semi-structured guided interviews served as the methodological approach. Expert interviews were conducted with representatives of citizen initiatives, trade unions and the Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia. The results reveal the need for policy measures in different areas: First, employees working for subcontractors of the lignite industry have a high risk of losing their jobs because there are virtually no support policies for them. Second, there needs to be more input by civic initiatives regarding the process of structural change. And last, land needs to be prevented from becoming a scarce resource in the Rhineland area due to current mining legislation. We use an actor-centred institutionalist framework to derive governance approaches in line with the needs of various stakeholders.
Integrated assessment models (IAMs) are commonly used by decision makers in order to derive climate policies. IAMs are currently based on climate-economics interactions, whereas the role of social system has been highlighted to be of prime importance on the implementation of climate policies. Beyond existing IAMs, we argue that it is therefore urgent to increase efforts in the integration of social processes within IAMs. For achieving such a challenge, we present some promising avenues of research based on the social branches of economics. We finally present the potential implications yielded by such social IAMs.
Fully decarbonising global power supply is essential to meet the objectives of the Paris Agreement. A wide range of inter- and transnational governance institutions exist that work towards the transformation of the power sector. But are these governance efforts sufficient to address the challenges? To address this question the article first identifies governance needs on the basis of systemic sector-specific transformation challenges and discusses the potential for international governance to address them. Second, the paper surveys existing inter- and transnational institutions and assess to what extent they exploit the potential of international governance. The analysis shows that many of the governance needs are already being satisfied to some extent, particularly with respect to the deployment of renewable energy. It also shows that a significant blind spot remains: the phase-out of fossil fuels for electricity generation. The detailed analysis enables us to identify options for enhancing the governance landscape.
The impacts of the COVID-19 crisis and the global response to it will co-determine the future of climate policy. The recovery packages responding to the impacts of the pandemic may either help to chart a new sustainable course, or they will further cement existing high-emission pathways and thwart the achievement of the Paris Agreement objectives. This article discusses how international climate governance may help align the recovery packages with the climate agenda. For this purpose, the article investigates five key governance functions through which international institutions may contribute: send guidance and signals, establish rules and standards, provide transparency and accountability, organize the provision of means of implementation, and promote collective learning. Reflecting on these functions, the article finds that the process under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), together with other international institutions, could promote sustainable recovery in several ways.
The Energy End-use Efficiency and Energy Services Directive (ESD) of the European Union requires the member states to define and attain an overall target of at least 9 % annual energy savings between 2008 and 2016. Even if this target is indicative, this is the first international framework mandating countries to report on their energy savings results and prove achievement of their targets. The directive thus also required the development of harmonised calculation methods that can be used by member states for this proof and reporting. Existing literature covers most of the usual issues related to energy savings evaluation, but mostly looking at single, given energy efficiency programmes or policies. The evaluation objective for the ESD implementation is different, as it aims at accounting for the whole energy savings achieved in a country. Moreover, one of the main difficulties is the diversity in history and experience on this topic among the member states. In this context, the European project EMEEES has worked out an integrated system of bottom-up and top-down methods for the measurement of energy savings. The paper presents the overview of its final results. The proposals, inter alia, include 20 bottom-up and 14 top-down case applications of general evaluation methods. They enable more than 90 % of the potential energy savings to be measured and reported. They were used as a starting point by the European Commission to develop the methods recently recommended to the member states. Furthermore, the paper briefly discusses the importance of the quantity to be measured-all or additional energy savings - and the effect of measures implemented before the entering into force of the ESD ("early action"), and what this meant for the methods to be developed. It compares the main elements of calculation needed to ensure consistent results between bottom-up and top-down methods at the overall national level. Finally, general conclusions are drawn about what could be the next steps in developing an evaluation system that enables a high degree of comparability of results between different countries.
The 2010 UN climate conference in Cancún emphasized that "Parties should, in all climate change related actions, fully respect human rights". However, so far there is no further guidance. This article discusses the relevant legal human rights norms and two case studies from the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). The first case (Bajo Aguán, Honduras) shows that the current absence of any international safeguards can lead to registration of highly problematic projects. The second case (Olkaria, Kenya) suggests that safeguards, introduced here as a side effect of World Bank involvement, can have a positive impact, but that it is necessary to have them based on human rights. It therefore seems recommendable that the UN climate regime develop mandatory human rights safeguards. In addition or alternatively, individual buyer countries or groups of countries, such as the European Union, could introduce their own additional requirements for CDM projects.
This article analyses the human rights implications of projects under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). While the CDM is likely to expire in the near future, the experience gained should be used to inform the rules of the new mechanism to be established under the 2015 Paris Agreement. We argue that the CDM and the new mechanism, as international organizations under the guidance of UNFCCC member states, should apply the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Based on the experience drawn from three case studies (two hydro power projects in Barro Blanco, Panama, and Bujagali, Uganda, and one geothermal energy project in Olkaria, Kenya), we show that CDM projects, while in formal compliance with CDM rules, can lead to a number of human rights infringements. We conclude with a number of recommendations on how to achieve a greater recognition of human rights in the new mechanism under the Paris Agreement.