Beyond Technology: Demand-Side Solutions for Climate Change Mitigation

By Felix Creutzig, Blanca Fernandez, H. Haberl, R. Khosla, Yacob Mulugetta, Karen C. Seto. 2016

289 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The assessment literature on climate change solutions to date has emphasized technologies and options based on cost-effectiveness analysis. However, many solutions to climate change mitigation misalign with such analytical frameworks. Here, we examine demand-side solutions, a crucial class of mitigation options that go beyond technological specification and cost-benefit analysis. To do so, we synthesize demand-side mitigation options in the urban, building, transport, and agricultural sectors. We also highlight the specific nature of demand-side solutions in the context of development. We then discuss key analytical considerations to integrate demand-side options into overarching assessments on mitigation. Such a framework would include infrastructure solutions that interact with endogenous preference formation. Both hard infrastructures, such as the built environment, and soft infrastructures, such as habits and norms, shape behavior and as a consequence offer significant potential for reducing overall e...

Subfields: Building and Construction, Economics and Econometrics, Environmental Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a6e28c1b57aeaa6680227bfb7302de199f76c8ce

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Building and Construction

1. Yong Geng
2. J. Barrett
3. Klaus Hubacek
4. T. Wiedmann
5. Shobhakar Dhakal
6. Robbie M. Andrew
7. Felix Creutzig
8. S. Pachauri

In Economics and Econometrics

1. T. Wiedmann
2. J. Barrett
3. Robbie M. Andrew
4. Klaus Hubacek
5. D. Guan
6. G. P. Peters
7. J. Minx
8. Manfred Lenzen

In Environmental Engineering

1. T. Wiedmann
2. Robbie M. Andrew
3. J. Barrett
4. F. Krausmann
5. G. P. Peters
6. H. Haberl
7. Manfred Lenzen
8. K. Erb

Citations in the corpus

• Demand-side solutions to climate change mitigation consistent with high levels of well-being (2021, unknown): “Evaluating these options mostly from a macroeconomic cost-benefit perspective is relevant, but it fails to reflect the wider impacts through benefits and costs of mitigation strategies from human wellbeing perspective 5 .”
• Societal Transformations in Models for Energy and Climate Policy: The Ambitious Next Step (2019, background): “result of diverse methodologies.(92) Such case studies are more often collected for the global North rather than the South, as has been shown for urban solutions to climate change(93) and hence for countries with liberalized market access and free trade.”
• Quantifying the potential for climate change mitigation of consumption options (2020, background): “car-free zones and days; Vehicle and fuel tax increases and toll charges; Make driving less convenient in urban areas; Enforce stricter air pollution standards; Ban car advertising Raising awareness about co-benefits associated with active travel [58]; Social feedback with the visibility of cycling ”
• A review of trends and drivers of greenhouse gas emissions by sector from 1990 to 2018 (2021, background): “This subsector can be reallocated to consuming sectors as indirect (scope 2) emissions, thus highlighting the importance of energy demand as a driver of global climate change (de la Rue du Can et al 2015, Creutzig et al 2016, 2018).”
• Identifying critical supply chains and final products: An input-output approach to exploring the energy-water-food nexus (2018, background): “At the final demand stage, policies such as waste reduction, lifetime optimisation and dietary change will reduce environmental impacts [42,45,46].”
• A systematic review of the evidence on decoupling of GDP, resource use and GHG emissions, part I: bibliometric and conceptual mapping (2020, background): “We thereby contribute to a much needed renewed focus on demand-side solutions to climate change mitigation (Creutzig et al 2016, 2018).”
• The Material Stock–Flow–Service Nexus: A New Approach for Tackling the Decoupling Conundrum (2017, background): “Raising efficiency may be important, but it is most likely not sufficient to move toward sustainability [19,114].”
• Demand-side solutions for climate mitigation: Bottom-up drivers of household energy behavior change in the Netherlands and Spain (2020, background): “mitigation strategies worldwide [1,15,16], empirical studies on individual energy-related choices and behavioral factors impacting them are scarce.”