Abstract
Sustainable development embraces a broad spectrum of social, economic and ecological aspects. Thus, a sustainable transformation process of energy systems is inevitably multidimensional and needs to go beyond climate impact and cost considerations. An approach for an integrated and interdisciplinary sustainability assessment of energy system transformation pathways is presented here. It first integrates energy system modeling with a multidimensional impact assessment that focuses on life cycle-based environmental and macroeconomic impacts. Then, stakeholders’ preferences with respect to defined sustainability indicators are inquired, which are finally integrated into a comparative scenario evaluation through a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA), all in one consistent assessment framework. As an illustrative example, this holistic approach is applied to the sustainability assessment of ten different transformation strategies for Germany. Applying multi-criteria decision analysis reveals that both ambitious (80%) and highly ambitious (95%) carbon reduction scenarios can achieve top sustainability ranks, depending on the underlying energy transformation pathways and respective scores in other sustainability dimensions. Furthermore, this research highlights an increasingly dominant contribution of energy systems’ upstream chains on total environmental impacts, reveals rather small differences in macroeconomic effects between different scenarios and identifies the transition among societal segments and climate impact minimization as the most important stakeholder preferences.
Highlights
IntroductionFrom the Paris Agreement and the related Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), to the European Green Deal [1], national energy and climate plans [2], climate
Our research addresses the challenge of integrating various sustainability dimensions, setting the scene for a more genuine sustainability assessment:
On the second analysis level, a multi-criteria decision analysis using citizen’s preferences allows us to rank the various scenarios in terms of their sustainability performances, as shown in Sections 3.3 and 3.4
Summary
From the Paris Agreement and the related Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), to the European Green Deal [1], national energy and climate plans [2], climate. Sustainability 2021, 13, 5217 protection is currently dominating the social debate on the sustainable development. The political debate on sustainable development of energy supply is largely narrowed to achieving climate protection goals through renewable energy sources at reasonable costs for citizens and industry. While climate protection is admittedly an important goal in the context of sustainable development, the massive focus on CO2 emissions is at odds with the extensive definition of sustainability. Sustainability concepts and related indicator systems have, e.g., been developed for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals [3], the Sustainability
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