Climate target fulfilment in scenarios for a sustainable Swedish built environment beyond growth

Abstract

This paper explores opportunities for the built environment to fulfill a far-reaching greenhouse gas (GHG) emission target in Sweden in 2050, in a context of low or no economic growth. A spreadsheet model was created, allowing for a quantitative estimation of GHG emissions and operational energy use for the built environment. Building on previous qualitative descriptions of four future scenarios, the model was run to investigate what reaching the target would require in each scenario. The results can inform policy discussions and provide insights on what strategies appear to be significant, and what they entail in terms of operational energy use in 2050 and cumulated embodied emissions from investments prior to 2050. It thus appears particularly important to decarbonate the energy mix and reduce floor areas through space sharing and optimization. When emission factors for heat and electricity are very low, the climate impact of construction materials becomes an important issue, on par with operational energy use, and strategies aimed at improving construction processes or avoiding new construction gain relevance. Extensive renovation for energy efficiency exhibits in this case a tradeoff between embodied emissions from prior investments and energy use, as decreasing one means increasing the other.