Sufficiency in passenger transport and its potential for lowering energy demand

Abstract

Prior research suggests that energy demand-side interventions have a large potential in climate change mitigation, connected to co-benefits in human well-being and several Sustainable Development Goals. However, it is challenging to translate such strategies into local and sectoral realities. We explore sufficiency futures for German passenger transport, a sector that is assumed to further grow in most studies, to analyse demand reduction potentials. In an interdisciplinary research design, we collect 133 diverse drivers of change of which we construct three sufficiency storylines. We translate them into parameters of the aggregated transport model quetzal_germany and quantify it through an expert survey. Results indicate that passenger transport energy demand can be lowered by up to 73%, while pointing at the various cultural, political, economic, technological, and organisational developments that are responsible for this change and show co-benefits for well-being. The comparison to global low energy demand studies suggests that our results lie between two boundaries: the absolute minimum for decent living standards and the most ambitious illustrative modelling pathway in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report. This work bridges the gap between ambitious climate targets from a global perspective and corresponding system design requirements in the local context.