Large emission reductions in buildings and transport are possible by integrating demand-side strategies to electrify energy use, improve technological efficiency, and reduce or shift patterns of activity. With enabling policies and infrastructures, final energy users can make significant contributions to climate goals, particularly through widespread deployment of heat pumps and electric vehicles.@en

Decarbonization of energy-using sectors is essential for tackling climate change. We use an ensemble of global integrated assessment models to assess CO₂ emissions reduction potentials in buildings and transport, accounting for system interactions. We focus on three intervention strategies with distinct emphases: reducing or changing activity, improving technological efficiency and electrifying energy end use. We find that these strategies can reduce emissions by 51–85% in buildings and 37–91% in transport by 2050 relative to a current policies scenario (ranges indicate model variability). Electrification has the largest potential for direct emissions reductions in both sectors. Interactions between the policies and measures that comprise the three strategies have a modest overall effect on mitigation potentials. However, combining different strategies is strongly beneficial from an energy system perspective as lower electricity demand reduces the need for costly supply-side investments and infrastructure.

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The aim of this article is to provide an overview of greenhouse gas emission reduction potentials for 2030 based on the assessment of detailed sectoral studies. The overview updates a previous assessment that dates back more than ten years. We find a total emission reduction potential of 30-36 GtCO2e compared to a current-policies baseline of 61 GtCO2e. The energy production and conversion sector is responsible for about one third of this potential and the agriculture, buildings, forestry, industry, and transport sectors all contribute substantially to the total potential. The potential for 2030 is enough to bridge the gap towards emissions pathways that are compatible with a maximum global temperature rise of 1.5-2 °C compared to preindustrial levels.

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Limiting climate change below a given temperature will require fundamental changes in the current energy system, both in the energy supply and the energy demand sectors. Previous global model-based analyses, however, have focused mostly on energy supply transformations. Therefore, in this study we respond to this knowledge gap by analysing the future energy demand projections in both baseline and climate policy scenarios of global models in detail. We examine the projections for the industry, transport and buildings sectors across four models and three different reference scenarios from the Shared-Socioeconomic Pathway framework by applying a decomposition analysis. We compare the projected demand side mitigation efforts to a more detailed, sector-specific, technology-oriented assessment of demand-side abatement potential for the year 2030. Without climate policy, model-based projections show that baseline emissions can grow rapidly in industry and transport sectors, but are also highly uncertain across models. The decomposition analysis shows that the key uncertainty across the global scenarios is the projected final energy per capita. For modellers therefore there lies a challenge to better understand drivers of future energy efficiency and service demand, that contribute to the projected energy demand. This model enhancement would moreover allow to evaluate policy measures that can impact this relation. The technology assessment estimates that in particular in the transport and buildings sector there is a higher potential to reduce demand-side emissions through energy efficiency improvements than implemented in the scenarios. Improved insulation, higher electric vehicle penetration rates and modal shift for example could reduce final energy demand to lower levels in the short term than currently projected, reducing the dependency on fuel switching required in current scenarios to meet the stringent climate targets.@en