Study on optimisation of energy poverty indicators collected at EU and national level : final report
(2024)
The global building sector, responsible for over 30% of CO2 emissions, necessitates urgent decarbonization efforts. This paper examines residential building decarbonization policies in three major economies - the European Union (EU), China, and India. It provides an overview of diverse policies through policy landscape analysis and delves into the design specifics with a detailed policy intensity analysis of building energy codes, information disclosure, and financial incentives in each region. Our findings reveal a diverse mix of policies targeting residential building decarbonization in all three regions. While the EU and China have long-established diverse policy instruments, India's building energy efficiency policies are relatively recent and limited. Detailed analyses of building energy codes, information disclosure, and financial incentives expose variations in ambition, scope, and implementation, even with shared policy instruments. Significant advancements in building energy codes, particularly in stringency and compliance checks, are evident in the EU and China. Conversely, India faces a notable obstacle with limited adoption of residential building energy codes, impacting its journey towards net-zero. The EU leads in building energy labelling policies, while China and India encounter various challenges hindering widespread implementation. Financial incentives across the three regions predominantly take the form of subsidies, potentially straining public budgets. The study concludes with reflections on the pressing need for future research extending beyond the operational phase of buildings.
Charting future emissions pathways is a central tenet of IPCC assessment reports (AR), yet it is unclear how underlying drivers (including around policy and technology) have influenced the evolution of emissions pathways. Here we compare scenarios in AR5 and AR6 and find that scenarios without specific climate policies enforced have shifted lower in each scenario generation, owing to falling low-carbon technology costs and reduced expectations for economic growth, reducing fossil-fuel shares in energy and industry. Mitigation pathways consistent with 1.5-2 °C have seen increasing electrification rates and higher shares of variable renewables in electricity in more recent scenario generations, implying reduced reliance on coal, nuclear, bioenergy and carbon capture and storage, reflecting changing costs. Despite the shrinking carbon budget due to insufficient recent climate action, mitigation costs have not increased given more optimistic low-carbon technology cost projections. Moving forward, scenario producers must continually recalibrate to keep abreast of technology, policy and societal developments to remain policy relevant.