Abstract
Countries’ emission reduction commitments under the Paris Agreement have significant implications for lifestyles. National planning to meet emission targets is based on modelling and analysis specific to individual countries, whereas global integrated assessment models provide scenario projections in a consistent framework but with less granular output. We contribute a novel methodology for translating global scenarios into lifestyle implications at the national and household levels, which is generalisable to any service or country and versatile to work with any model or scenario. Our 5Ds method post-processes Integrated Assessment Model projections of sectoral energy demand for the global region to derive energy-service-specific lifestyle change at the household level. We illustrate the methodology for two energy services (mobility, heating) in two countries (UK, Sweden), showing how effort to reach zero carbon targets varies between countries and households. Our method creates an analytical bridge between global model output and information that can be used at national and local levels, making clear the lifestyle implications of climate targets.
Highlights
The Paris Climate agreement has set out goals of limiting global warming to well below 2 ◦ C and requires each country to maintain nationally determined contributions to greenhouse gas reductions over time [1]
We introduce a multi-step 5Ds method to translate energy demand for global regions as output from global integrated assessment models (IAMs) into information about lifestyle change at the household level in specific countries
It allows lifestyle changes for countries and households implied by different scenarios and models to be compared in a standardised way, for example exploring the trade-offs between scenarios emphasising supply-side transformation (e.g., [83]) versus demand-side transformation (e.g., [5])
Summary
The Paris Climate agreement has set out goals of limiting global warming to well below 2 ◦ C and requires each country to maintain nationally determined contributions to greenhouse gas reductions over time [1]. As energy demand is directly related to energy used in everyday life, these pathways imply significant changes in lifestyle [5,6]. The model-based scenarios used to explore the implications of the Paris climate targets provide aggregated projections of energy demand. There is a gap between these abstract parameters and information about change at the household level consistent with the long-term targets. The high-level scenario output for global regions does not indicate how energy demand varies in different geographies or across heterogenous household types
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