Providing decent living with minimum energy: A global scenario
By J. Millward-Hopkins, J. Steinberger, Narasimha D. Rao, Yannick Oswald. Global Environmental Change, 2020
426 citations recorded by the source corpus.
It is increasingly clear that averting ecological breakdown will require drastic changes to contemporary human society and the global economy embedded within it. On the other hand, the basic material needs of billions of people across the planet remain unmet. Here, we develop a simple, bottom-up model to estimate a practical minimal threshold for the final energy consumption required to provide decent material livings to the entire global population. We find that global final energy consumption in 2050 could be reduced to the levels of the 1960s, despite a population three times larger. However, such a world requires a massive rollout of advanced technologies across all sectors, as well as radical demand-side changes to reduce consumption – regardless of income – to levels of sufficiency. Sufficiency is, however, far more materially generous in our model than what those opposed to strong reductions in consumption often assume.
Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/703e0602e76dbf4829cdd018d0d619818d94db3f
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In Environmental Engineering
In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
Citations in the corpus
- Demand-side solutions to climate change mitigation consistent with high levels of well-being (2021, positive): “The benchmark was provided by the Low Energy Demand (LED) scenario modelled with the IAM MESSAGE 54 , with more recent scenarios emphasizing further opportunities by constraining GHG emissions further in the Global North 55,56 .”