In the EU, COVID-19 and associated policy responses led to economy-wide disruptions and shifts in services demand, with considerable energy-system implications. The European Commission's response ...paved the way towards enhancing climate ambition through the European Green Deal. Understanding the interactions among environmental, social, and economic dimensions in climate action post-COVID thus emerged as a key challenge. This study disaggregates the implications of climate ambition, speed of economic recovery from COVID-19, and behavioural changes due to pandemic-related measures and/or environmental concerns for EU transition dynamics, over the next decade. It soft-links two large-scale energy-economy models, EU-TIMES and NEMESIS, to shed light on opportunities and challenges related to delivering on the EU's 2030 climate targets. Results indicate that half the effort required to reach the updated 55% emissions reduction target should come from electricity decarbonisation, followed by transport. Alongside a post-COVID return to normal, the European Green Deal may lead to increased carbon prices and fossil-fuel rebounds, but these risks may be mitigated by certain behavioural changes, gains from which in transport energy use would outweigh associated consumption increases in the residential sector. Finally, the EU recovery mechanism could deliver about half the required investments needed to deliver on the 2030 ambition.
•This study soft-links an energy system model and a macroeconometric model for the EU.•Electricity decarbonisation can make up half the effort to −55% followed by transport.•Investments as part of EU green recovery could finance about half of what is required.•The pandemic is unlikely to heavily impact the EU's long-term emissions trajectory.•Work- and travel-related behaviour changes could considerably reduce investment needs.
Various environmental challenges, particularly the rising severity of the impacts of climate change, require a systematic shift in and decarbonization of the global economy. Due to their high ...environmental impacts, buildings and construction have a special role in decarbonization. Environmental modelling of building stock dynamics can help policy makers and inform decision making.
This study presents a systematic review of both the latest scientific literature on environmental modelling of building stocks and related EU policy initiatives. Our findings illuminate the strengths and limitations of existing approaches as well as the potential of such modelling and the required directions for future development to provide effective policy support.
Based on the assessment of 104 scientific papers, our study shortlisted and analysed 22 environmental building stock modelling approaches. While promising, these show various limitations on their effectiveness in supporting decarbonization efforts while avoiding burden shifting. Future building stock models should offer extended system boundaries and comprehensive life cycle assessment, improved hotspot analysis and impact monitoring across spatiotemporal scales. A long-term perspective on the entire building stock covering climate and other environmental impacts is needed, as outlined in the latest standards. By linking existing studies to related EU policy objectives, we identify various studies that investigate scenarios and strategies relevant to EU policy makers and highlight research gaps.
Future research should enable comprehensive environmental assessment of building stocks across scales and emphasize the monitoring of multiple environmental impacts of building stock development to ensure compliance with environmental targets and minimization of trade-offs.
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•Integrated review of EU policy documents and latest approaches for environmental modelling of building stocks.•We analyse scope, methods, tools and data to find existing studies mostly focus on housing stock and on short to medium time horizons.•Existing studies are limited in the number of archetypes, as well as coverage of building parts, life cycle stages and environmental indicators.•The scope and level of detail of existing models hence require elaboration to effectively support EU policy for decarbonization of building operation and construction.•Future research is particularly needed on environmental hotspot analysis and monitoring of impacts across time and space.
The European Union has built an interdependent framework to promote sustainability transition through commitment in resource efficiency (RE) actions as echoed in the European Green Deal. Although the ...factors affecting firms' decision to adopt a green strategy have been extensively explored, those affecting commitment remain unexplored. Thus, we study whether commitment of European SMEs to RE actions fosters sustainability transition and, what drives such commitment. Data includes more than 37,000 European SMEs from 2013 through 2017, combined with country-specific characteristics explored via a probit model with sample selection. Findings indicate that during the study period there has been a change in the structure of incentives of the firms, as in the beginning of the period, adoption of RE actions and future engagement were considered as independent decisions. We document that commitment is driven RE enhancers such as the implementation of new technological paradigms, cooperation, and specialized business advice while resource productivity, green energy, and competitiveness further foster commitment. Findings advocate that commitment in RE actions to achieve sustainability transition is a feasible reality. Efforts of policymakers should focus on further enabling RE committed firms by reducing policy red tape.
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•Adoption & commitment in RE actions are not independent when exploring sustainability.•The structure of incentives of SMEs changed from 2013 to 2017.•Adoption, commitment, and macro-level characteristics influence sustainability transition.•Specialized advise and business consulting on RE actions foster commitment.•Policymakers should focus on fostering a hospitable business ecosystem for SMEs.
The current European building stock is ageing and requires significant renovation efforts to improve its energy performance and ensure structsural safety. As part of the key actions of the European ...Green Deal, increased building renovations, a `renovation wave', is needed to ensure that the ambitious EU energy saving and decarbonisation goals can be reached by 2030 and 2050, accordingly. To incentivise renovation further, integrating energy retrofitting with seismic strengthening is explored in this study. A combined energy and seismic retrofitting is investigated across twenty European cities with varied seismic hazard levels and different climatic conditions. Typical building types are defined both in terms of their energy and structural characteristics and are associated to the building population of each city. A monetary metric for combined assessments based on expected annual losses from energy costs and seismic losses is used and an optimum retrofitting scenario is identified. By means of the proposed renovation rate of 3%, a reduction of approximately 30% of primary energy use and CO2 emissions may be achieved within a decade. Taking into account energy costs and costs related to structural damage it is found that a combined retrofitting scheme will reduce substantially the payback periods in moderate to high seismicity regions. In such locations the combined energy and seismic retrofitting is justified and proposed instead of the sole energy retrofitting typically applied today in existing buildings.
The concept of sustainable development integrates activities in the economic, environmental and social areas. Energy policy, which is very closely linked to climate protection, is of key importance ...for achieving the goals of the concept in question. All these elements are connected by the European Green Deal strategy and Agenda 2030. Their implementation requires the evaluation of previous actions undertaken within the framework of sustainable development and the diagnosis of the current state. Therefore, this article presents the results of such research in relation to the key industry connected with this process, which is the energy sector. The research methodology was based on the analysis of 14 indicators that characterize four basic areas (dimensions) related to energy and climate sustainability. These indicators concern energy and climate as well as social and economic issues. This approach makes it possible to comprehensively assess the actions taken so far in the implementation of sustainable economic development in the energy and climate area in the European Union (EU) countries. The entropy-complex-proportional-assessment (COPRAS) methodologies, which belong to the group of multiple criteria decision-making methods, were used for this study. The conducted research allowed for the assessment of the changes in the EU countries in terms of energy and climate sustainability between 2009–2018. In addition, the effects of the introduced changes in individual years and in relation to the studied areas (dimensions) were also evaluated. Based on the results, considering the adopted criteria, the EU countries were divided into groups similar to the level of energy and climate sustainability. The results constitute a valuable set of data, which allows for a wide and in-depth multicriteria analysis. This allows for a very objective and broad assessment of the effects of sustainable development policies in the EU countries and the current state in the context of the European Green Deal strategy and Agenda 2030.
Considering the necessity of increasing the renewable energy consumption stated in the European Green Deal (European Commission policy initiatives envisaging European Union (EU) to become climate ...neutral by 2050), the aim of this paper is to validate the so-called Environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) and the revised (or renewable energy) Kuznets curve (RKC) in ten Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries (represented by Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia) in the period from 1990 until 2019. Conditioned by data availability, the impact of governance in these countries on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is assessed in the period 2002–2019.
The results based on the panel autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) models indicated the contribution of renewable energy consumption in reducing pollution and the role of labour productivity in enhancing GHG emissions in the long run. Moreover, our findings demonstrated that domestic credit to private sector reduced pollution in the long run only in the period of 2002–2019. In addition, such factors as the rule of law, regulatory quality and control of corruption were the governance dimensions that contributed to the environmental quality in the long run. The empirical results of our study might be helpful in supporting the environmental and economic policies in the EU countries for achieving their sustainable development and the European Green Deal objectives.
Cities representing more than one third of the EU population have already developed their mitigation action plans with the support of the Covenant of Mayors initiative. This study digs into the ...drivers leading European cities in setting ambitious GHG reduction targets by 2030. A total number of 246 local action plans, accepted in the Covenant of Mayors initiative, were evaluated, and ambitious municipalities (with reduction targets over 50%) were compared against those committing to regular targets (40–50%).
Results show that the key factor enabling a higher climate ambition in cities is to develop local mitigation actions in line with the results of the baseline emission inventory, focusing on implementing actions in the most emitting sectors of activity. Furthermore, the study reveals the abilities of specific cities to set highly ambitious mitigation targets: to municipalise energy facilities increasing renewable energy production, and to be able of developing mitigation actions even tackling highly emitting sectors (e.g., transport) that traditionally are not under the competence of local governments.
The study also shows other easy-to-reach solutions that every local authority can take into account to increase its ambition such as developing in-house action plans and conducting a deep stakeholder engagement and participatory processes from the initial stage of the action plan development.
•To develop local action plans aligned with the baseline emission assessment.•To increase the share of renewables by signing agreements with energy utilities.•To develop in-house action plans and to conduct participatory process.
Demand for the construction of new structures is increasing all over the world. Since the construction sector dominates the global carbon footprint, new construction methods are needed with reduced ...embodied carbon and high resource efficiency to realize a sustainable future. In this direction, Metal Additive Manufacturing, also known as metal 3D printing, can be an opportunity. Many studies are underway to answer open questions about the metal 3D printing processes and products for high-tech industries. The construction sector must join the metal 3D printing research more actively to enrich the knowledge and experience on this technology, and correctly adapt the process parameters suitable to the construction sector requirements. This paper states the opinion of a research group composed of academics and practitioners from Europe, the US, Japan, and South Africa on how metal 3D printing can be a complementary tool/technology to conventional manufacturing to increase productivity rates, and reduce the costs and CO2 emissions in the construction industry.
Carbon footprint (CF) has become a crucial piece to develop strategies to tackle the climate change issue. Its implementation makes it possible establishing a path towards decarbonisation with the ...aim to comply with European and global greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions guidelines and commitments. Currently, several tools for calculating the CF are available. However, the differences in the calculation methodology and data collection prevent comparative studies based on the results obtained to be made. For this reason, CEDEX (Centro de Estudios y Experimentación de Obras Públicas), commissioned by Puertos del Estado, prepared a good practice guide with a common methodology for calculating the CF of Spanish Ports. In this study, we tested this standardized methodology for the first time in the Port of Vigo (NW Spain) during a four-year period (2017–2020), developing a web tool to facilitate its application, with the ultimate aim to extend its implementation nationwide. This work demonstrates the suitability of the CEDEX methodology to quantify the CF in harbours, and to assess the interannual evolution of the emissions, thus facilitating the assessment of the different environmental strategies implemented in the port to achieve the emissions reduction targets. The main CF loads are derived from the loading/unloading operations, due to the consumption of fuel, accounting to a value of 14,161 kg CO2 eq per TEU (twenty-foot equivalent unit). With the implementation of the methodology developed in this study, a reduction of 55 % of GHG emissions could be achieved in all port activities, thus complying with the objectives of the European Green Deal for 2030.
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•A new tool to calculate the carbon footprint (CF) has been tested in one Spanish port.•All port activities causing GHG emissions are included in the tested methodology.•Use of CF data and a decision-making tool yielded a 55 % reduction in GHG emissions.•The proposed methodology facilitates ports achieving the European Green Deal targets.
Making agriculture sustainable is a global challenge. In the European Union (EU), the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is failing with respect to biodiversity, climate, soil, land degradation as well ...as socio‐economic challenges.
The European Commission's proposal for a CAP post‐2020 provides a scope for enhanced sustainability. However, it also allows Member States to choose low‐ambition implementation pathways. It therefore remains essential to address citizens' demands for sustainable agriculture and rectify systemic weaknesses in the CAP, using the full breadth of available scientific evidence and knowledge.
Concerned about current attempts to dilute the environmental ambition of the future CAP, and the lack of concrete proposals for improving the CAP in the draft of the European Green Deal, we call on the European Parliament, Council and Commission to adopt 10 urgent action points for delivering sustainable food production, biodiversity conservation and climate mitigation.
Knowledge is available to help moving towards evidence‐based, sustainable European agriculture that can benefit people, nature and their joint futures.
The statements made in this article have the broad support of the scientific community, as expressed by above 3,600 signatories to the preprint version of this manuscript. The list can be found here (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3685632).
A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.
A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.
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