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Reliably reducing the emissions in the building sector plays a crucial role if the 1.5°C climate target from the Paris Agreement is to be met. The observed trends show a significant increase in building energy use, especially in emerging economies. Counteracting these trends is absolutely essential, especially in the light of urbanisation, population growth and changing lifestyles. In terms of mitigating the climate impact of buildings, ensuring high levels of efficiency (i.e. very low energy needs, especially for heating and cooling) has the greatest potential for saving energy and emissions, and is at the same time the prerequisite for effective use of energy from renewable sources. Clearly defined targets and suitable metrics are essential to enable appropriate design decisions. Implemented projects clearly indicate that quality assured design and construction lead to reliable in-use energy performance. Effective policy packages to address opportunities and challenges are important drivers to support the uptake of state-of-the-art efficiency measures in the urban building sector.
Although it is not part of what has been called the "ambition mechanism" or "ratchet mechanism", Article 6 of the Paris Agreement also has an explicit requirement to promote ambition. Article 6 specifically highlights that some Parties choose to pursue voluntary cooperation in the implementation of their nationally determined contributions to allow for higher ambition in their mitigation and adaptation actions. Despite the common purpose, the two elements have to date been discussed mostly in isolation, both in the negotiations as well as in the wider literature. This JIKO Policy Paper sets out to change this by exploring the relationship between Article 6 and the Global Stocktake.
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 governance brief aims to provide practical examples on how investments in urban infrastructure, clean energy, and energy efficiency can be implemented; and how these are embedded in multi-level governance, experimentation, and policy-learning. It draws on examples from the German energy system transition, which can be understood as a large-scale, real-life laboratory for the governance of a sustainability transition of an entire national energy system. The federal state of North-Rhine Westphalia's experience illustrates the complexity of the governance challenge of implementing low-carbon system transitions.
This JIKO Policy Paper explores how Parties using Article 6 can increase their mitigation ambition. Building on a broad definition of ambition raising which puts the intensification of climate change mitigation targets and actions by Parties at its centre, eight different ambition raising options are identified. The analysis shows that these options are associated with different technical, institutional and political challenges, calling for a combination of different ambition raising options.
The objective of this paper is to analyse and make recommendations on a safeguard system for Article 6 that aims at preventing potential harm that mitigation activities may cause on the ground to local stakeholders and the environment. Following some definitory aspects of what and how to safeguard, the paper analyses a number of safeguard systems and do no harm principles as well as tools to implement them. It then gives an overview on Parties' views on the matter, as uttered in their latest submissions on Art. 6 options, as well as an overview of the references in the UNFCCC's SBSTA Chair's text with respect to sustainable development, safeguards, and human rights issues. The paper closes with recommendations on a possible safeguard system for Article 6.
This policy paper reviews the concept of additionality in the context of the Paris Agreement. Additionality is a key criterion that helps to maintain the environmental integrity of the Paris Agreement, especially when units created under Article 6.2 or 6.4 are used for offsetting purposes whether that is by Parties in order to meet their NDCs or whether by other entities with legal mitigation obligations.
It does so by first reviewing key concepts such as offsetting, environmental integrity, and baseline. Subsequently, it explores the context of additionality under the Paris Agreement. More specifically it discusses what should be counted as the baseline for additionality demonstration. The subsequent chapter then highlights the challenges with establishing additionality, that is establishing a causal relationship between a policy intervention and a proposed activity. Finally, the Policy Paper discusses aspects of international governance with respect to additionality.
Many hope that the Global Stocktake under the Paris Agreement can become a catalyst for increased mitigation ambition over time. Based on different theories of change, this paper outlines four governance functions for the Global Stocktake. It can contribute to the Paris Agreement as a pacemaker (stimulating and synchronizing policy processes across governance levels), by ensuring accountability of Parties, by enhancing ambition through benchmarks for action and transformative learning, and by reiterating and refining the guidance and signal provided from the Paris Agreement. The paper further outlines process- and information-related preconditions that would enable an ideal Global Stocktake.
European coal mining regions face massive transformational challenges. The necessity of climate protection only intensifies a trend, prevalent in all of Europe: coal mining has been losing its economic importance over the last decades. Fewer and fewer people are employed in the sector. Coal regions face the challenge of how to facilitate a just transition, and which perspectives to develop for a future beyond coal.
Against this background this study analyses the current situation in four key European coal mining regions, namely: Aragon in Spain, Lusatia in Germany, Silesia in Poland and Western Macedonia in Greece. The study provides a brief summary of the regions' socio-economic structure, including the respective role of coal mining. An assessment of how existing European structural instruments, specifically the European Structural and Investment Funds (the ESI Funds) are utilised in the region, forms the core of the study.
The Ernst Strüngmann Forum seeks to link justice, sustainability, and diversity agendas. In support, this chapter discusses how linkages between these three concepts have formed and changed in the climate change discourse, particularly in light of the recent Paris Agreement. As the latest addition to the portfolio of international climate change agreements, the Paris Agreement establishes a landscape in which nation-states, subnational actors, and transnational networks will be able to reconfigure existing linkages between sustainability, diversity, and justice, and perhaps improve upon them.
Here, three possible developments are identified which may substantially influence the reconfiguration process. Recognition is given to the sustainability and justice deficits that have plagued the "top-down" character of the international climate change discourse, and it is hypothesized that the Paris Agreement opens the door for "bottom-up" movements to claim a larger segment of climate change policy decision making and design. In turn, the "polycentric" landscape created by such "movement from below" appears to emphasize concepts such as inclusivity and transparency perhaps allowing for explicit climate justice commitments. Finally, to advance societal transformation and embrace diversity, it is hypothesized that the scientific endeavor needs to be transformed from a purely analytical pursuit to an effort that makes use of the wide range of scientific competences and provides support for transformative innovations to change unsustainable sociotechnical systems.
The inclusion of references to human rights in the Paris Agreement was celebrated as a milestone towards greater integration of human rights in environmental and climate governance. Beyond their symbolic value, the significance of these provisions however depends on the extent to which they inform the implementation of the Paris Agreement both at the national and international levels. This article takes stock of the integration of human rights in climate governance and identifies concrete opportunities to ensure that human rights considerations are included in the Paris Implementation Guidelines to be adopted at COP-24, promoting climate action that aligns with Parties' human rights obligations. We first consider the relevance of human rights to climate action and the incremental recognition of these linkages in the international climate regime - both in the lead up to the adoption of the Paris Agreement and since. We then consider in specific terms how human rights could inform five key dimensions of the Paris Agreement's Implementation Guidelines: NDC guidance, adaptation communications, transparency framework, global stocktake, and the article 6 mechanisms. This article will reflect on past experience of how climate policy impacts human rights and on proposals put forward in the context of the negotiations of the implementation guidelines. It concludes with recommendations on a right-based approach to the implementation of the Paris Agreement.
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.
Poor households in Germany and those that are close to the poverty line are more likely to suffer from increases in electricity costs. One consequence of this is the increasing number of cases in which the supplier disconnects a household's power. According to the Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur), a total of almost 359,000 interruptions of the electricity supply were caused in 2015 due to outstanding payments. In order to avoid disconnection from the electricity grid, more and more utility companies have begun to offer prepayment meters (PPMs) to their customers as a response to outstanding payments and a growing number of customers owing debts to their energy supplier. The phenomenon of an increasing number of households affected by energy poverty in Germany is new, and thus the number of PPMs is still low. As a result, experiences in this context are - compared to other countries (e.g. Great Britain) - far from extensive, and political awareness of the problem is low. This paper presents the findings of Germany's first scientific survey on experiences with the use of PPMs.
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.
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 study shows that more cyclists and pedestrians can make cities safer. The ranking, compiled by the Wuppertal Institute and funded by Greenpeace, compared 13 metropolises in terms of public transport, road safety, air quality, mobility management, and the proportion of cyclists and pedestrians. The result: Amsterdam and Copenhagen, residents travel about a third of their trips by bicycle, and these cities have the fewest bicycle accidents.
Climate change induces various risks for supply chains of manufacturing firms. However, surveys have suggested that only a minority of firms conducts strategic adaptations, which we define as anticipatory and target-oriented action with the purpose of increasing resilience to climate change. While several barrier-centered studies have investigated the causality of non-adaptation in industry, the examined barriers are often not problem-specific. Furthermore, it has been shown that even in cases when managers perceive no barriers to adaptation at all, strategic adaptations may still not be conducted. On this background, the present analysis focuses on the logic of adaptive inaction, which we conceive, in particular, as inaction with regard to strategic adaptations. Adopting an action-theoretical perspective, the study examines (a) which aspects may shape the rationality of adaptive inaction among managers, (b) which more condensed challenges of conducting strategic adaptations emerge for managers, and (c) how the theoretical propositions can be tested. For this purpose, the study employs an exploratory approach. Thus, hypotheses on such aspects are explored, which may shape the rationality of adaptive inaction among managers. Subsequently, predictions are inferred from the theoretical propositions, which allow testing their empirical relevance. Methodologically, the hypotheses are explored by reexamining existing explanatory approaches from literature based on a set of pretheoretical assumptions, which include notions of bounded rationality. As a result, the study proposes 13 aspects which may constrain managers in conducting adaptations in such a way, which serves the economic utility of the firm. By condensing these aspects, 4 major challenges for managers are suggested: the challenges of (a) conducting long-term adaptations, of (b) conducting adaptations at an early point in time, of (c) conducting adaptations despite uncertain effects of the measures, and of (d) conducting adaptations despite cross-tier dependencies in supply chains. Finally, the study shows how the propositions can be tested and outlines a research agenda based on the developed theoretical suggestions.
In this perspective article, we undertake a brief empirical analysis of the dominant narratives in debates around India's energy future. India has ambitious goals for increasing renewable energy and enabling universal energy access, but there is little social consensus on how these goals should be achieved. We find two compelling narratives in energy policy debates in the country: "energy for development" that privileges energy as critical to economic growth and long term strategic security; and "energy for all" that prioritises the role of energy for basic development and ending poverty. We find that while these narratives find common ground on certain issues such as the role of coal, they clash in the socio-technical imaginaries they represent about India’s energy future. Indian energy policy has been characterised so far by top down, centralised policymaking. With this article, we highlight the societal choices that are inherent in discussions about transformations in India's electricity sector and call for further research on the socio-cultural dimensions of future energy pathways in India.