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Deutschland wird seine selbst gesetzten Klimaziele für 2020 sehr wahrscheinlich deutlich verfehlen, was die Frage aufwirft, inwieweit politische Rahmenbedingungen noch problemadäquat sind bzw. wo Veränderungen notwendig sind. Am Beispiel der privaten Kleinvermieter lässt sich zeigen, dass politische Instrumente häufig an den Bedürfnissen der Zielgruppen vorbei entwickelt werden und welche Veränderungen für das Gelingen der Wärmewende notwendig sind.
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.