The urgent need for a just transition in housing in Germany, to reduce the global environmental impacts and mitigate the risks of green colonialism, requires the development of policies that enable sufficiency. In the housing sector, this primarily involves reducing floor area per person to significantly decrease energy demand. Research in this field has focused on core principles needed for a sufficiency transition, taking a universalistic and global approach. Sufficiency modelling has been limited by a restricted understanding of sufficiency implementation and feasibility. Furthermore, scholars have neglected the need for differentiation between households living in very unequally distributed living spaces. Research investigating country-specific political and policy environments that allowed for the emergence of high floor area per person households is lacking for almost all regions. Thus, academic policy proposals are often too general, not tailored to households with the largest floor areas, and do not consider regional historical policy contexts. In this thesis, I aim to address this gap, using a mixed-method approach to comprehensively understand
the German housing context for meaningful policy recommendations. With an agglomerative hierarchical clustering algorithm, I identify households with the highest floor area per capita, characterized as single, without children, older, living outside large cities, residing in (detached) single-family houses, owning their homes, having low incomes, and located in West Germany. The historical driver analysis reveals the influence of capitalist, market-oriented policies, which promoted home ownership as retirement security to decrease provisioning by the state. These policies included subsidies favouring ownership and single-family houses, as well as large-scale privatization and financialization, shifting the housing sector’s focus to (international) investor profits rather than providing affordable and sufficient living space for all. Current policies miss the opportunity to redistribute floor area and hinder the flexible matching of housing supply and demand. Taking into account the identified target households and the historical context, a final critical reflection on existing policy proposals enriches the future design of sufficiency-enabling policies for the German housing sector and allows for a more accurate quantification of the impact reduction potential. This social science perspective allows sufficiency and industrial ecology scholars to situate their research in the German context and gain a deeper understanding of the historical drivers and enablers for sufficiency application.

The construction of our built environment is a major driver of global material use, greenhouse gas emissions, and their impacts on people and ecosystems. Nevertheless, there is a critical gap in understanding which purposes of construction activity drive these environmental impacts. To yield a detailed yet comprehensive and consistent representation of construction in the global economy, this research project proposes a multi-unit approach that expands the construction industry in multi-regional input-output tables. Focusing on the European Union, the project oPers insights into the climate impacts of five diPerent construction subsectors (buildings, roads, railways, electricity infrastructure, other civil engineering) by integrating bottom-up data on 14 materials used in the construction of 17 types of structures. Key findings of this disaggregation include: 1) The carbon footprint of construction increases with detailed input resolution. 2) Building construction dominates the carbon footprint of construction in most EU countries, but metal- and material-intensive civil engineering is more carbon- intensive than building construction. 3) Electricity and railway infrastructure relies more on outsourced emissions than building and road construction. The exploration of integrating bottom-up information on buildings and infrastructure from material stock analysis, life cycle inventories, and geographic information systems with economic statistics highlights future avenues for research on physical flows, as well as calls for a further standardisation and harmonisation of detailed national accounts. The developed procedure can have broader applications, benefiting urban planning, consumption footprint assessments, and scenario analyses aligned with international climate goals.

Power dynamics play a crucial role in inhibiting and advancing various policies, from climate action to wage negotiations. However, current integrated models addressing socio-economic and environmental issues often fail to account for the underlying drivers of these power dynamics, thereby illuminating a significant literature gap. This omission limits the ability of the models to capture real-world complexities and may hinder effective policy design.

This paper addresses this gap by exploring how power dynamics can be incorporated within integrated models which deal with socio-economic and environmental problems. It begins with a proof of concept, demonstrating how a specific type of power dynamic, namely labour union bargaining power, can be included into the World Trade Model (WTM), a dynamic form of Input-Output Analysis. This integration is coupled with supplementary research that explains the drivers of said power dynamic in order to address the literature gap. Notably, this paper has made additional contributions by being the first instance of power dynamics included in the WTM, developing new code to convert the WTM into a Multi-Regional Input-Output format to advance the field of dynamic Input-Output Analysis, and clearly documenting this code which was previously missing.

Additionally, the paper outlines a future research strategy focused on two main areas: including power dynamics as inputs to integrated models with parallel research on the drivers of the power dynamics evaluated, and also contains ideas on how to take steps to model the power relationships between actors themselves. This approach holds promise for providing a deeper understanding of how power dynamics influence socio-economic and environmental outcomes. The author advocates for further research to ensure power dynamics are not overlooked in models in order to have a more comprehensive representation of systemic issues.

In the spirit of equity, all humans should be entitled to a life congruous with a very high level of well-being. The development needed to achieve this would however heavily rely on manufactured assets, the production of which negatively impacts the climate system. Both efficiency- and sufficiency-based strategies have been put forward as solutions to reduce greenhouse gas remissions. Assessing their respective and combined effectiveness in supporting the realization of a fair and sustainable future is essential to guide future policy-making. Here I show that combining both would minimize the risk of a global warming beyond 1.5-2˚C while allowing developing regions, particularly Africa and Asia, to sufficiently raise the well-being of their citizens. Comparing different effort-sharing approaches, I further show that this sustainable development can be supported in international climate negotiations by adopting the Human Development Index (HDI) as a proxy for equitably allocating the remaining carbon budget (RCB). This supports research advocating for equating development with human well-being, rather than economic growth, and thus the introduction of demand-side interventions to reduce emissions. The ensuing discussion also points to need to strategically invest in assets in order to prevent unsustainable lock-ins and additional stranded assets.

Urban environments must be prepared to address the impacts of climate change and mitigate its repercussions. The rapidly surging rate of urbanization is expected to instigate significant land use and land cover changes, through expansion and densification of the built environment, on top of urban population growth. The Netherlands, a highly urbanized delta and densely populated country, is a prime example experiencing significant urban growth and climate-related events causing distress. This country has increasingly witnessed extreme weather events resulting in record-breaking heatwaves, drought, and precipitation leading to the disruption of public and transport infrastructures. The Netherland’s authorities have established new strategic spatial plans aimed at ensuring climate-proof infrastructure and climate resilience for the coming years. However, the extensive goals and targets at national and international levels complicate the situation. Key changes are being initiated at the local level, with results yet to be fully realized.
This research conducts a single case study on a renovated road intersection in Amsterdam Oost in collaboration with the Ideal(s) City project from the Amsterdam Institute for advanced metropolitan solutions. The primary aim is to investigate Amsterdam’s impacts on climate resilience and adaptation strategies. To assess the progress towards the program’s fifth ideal state of “sustainability”, a conceptual indicator list is derived from a literature review. This indicator list serves as a tool to evaluate the program’s inventory and study the sustainability outcomes of the case study. The examined indicator parameters include: (1) temperature & urban morphology, (2) surface materials, and (3) vegetation in the microclimate.
Through a combination of qualitative and quantitative secondary data, the case study is compared to the literary indicator list. This process results in a refined indicators set to support the development of The Ideal(s) City’s framework. The findings reveal a notable absence of all indicators in the inventory of the Ideal(s) City and the municipality of Amsterdam. To address this gap, recommendations are laid out to: First, the scientific community to further explore the application of indicators on traffic intersections in the city. Second, the Ideal(s) City programme to review and evaluate the existing indicators to fill the gaps and minimize the mismatch between the indicators. Third, the municipality of Amsterdam to increase the planting of trees and their variety on the median at Hugo de Vrieslaan to increase climate resilience and enhance the microclimatic conditions of traffic intersection.

Keywords: Case study • Climate resilience • Adaptation strategy • Urban road infrastructure • Urban microclimate • Urban morphology • Urban greening • Sustainability • Environmental assessment

Industrial decarbonisation has largely stagnated over the last years in Germany. A large share of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions stem from the combustion of natural gas for producing higher temperature process heat. High-Temperature Heat Pumps (HTHPs) are an emerging technology that can upgrade waste heat with electrical input to high temperatures needed for the processes and thus can contribute to the electrification of industries. Hence, HTHP can significantly reduce GHG emissions stemming from the production of process heat. While residential heat pumps are widely commercially available due to lower temperature requirements, no HTHPs were installed in German industries in 2018 due to multiple technical, market, and knowledge barriers. HTHPs are expected to reach temperatures up to 250°C soon, making the food and beverages industry a suitable sector due to process temperature requirements at the lower industrial spectrum (<250°C). The International Energy Agency (IEA) outlines that HTHPs are a core emerging technology to replace fossil-fuel boilers in industry over the next decades. Thus, there is a large market ahead for manufacturers. This study evaluates the techno-economic potential of HTHPs in the Germany food and beverages industry. Further, it evaluates the GHG emissions abatement potential in relation to total GHG emissions of the industrial sector. This study has a generalized and systemic scope, thus does neither consider specific case studies, nor performs process optimization. It follows a bottom-up approach to include process- and technology-specific information and scales it up to national level. This study uses two waste heat scenarios, first considering an average 45°C industrial waste heat availability as worst-case, and second considering direct exhaust temperatures as best-case scenario. The generic bottom-up approach results in limited, but more detailed, coverage which makes the results conservative estimates for the application potential of HTHPs in German industries. The most energy-intensive sub-sectors of the German food and beverages industry are sugar production, meat processing, dairy processing, bakery products production and beer production, which together accounted for approximately 9333 kt-CO2-equivalents in 2020. The processes dominating the thermal energy demand are mainly pasteurisation, cooking, baking, evaporation, and drying processes, which require higher temperatures for the evaporation of liquids and boiling off bacteria. The thermodynamic efficiency, the COPs, of applying HTHPs to the processes lay between 1,7 – 4,8 for the worst-case scenario and 2,4 – 22,7 for the best-case scenario. The technical potential for 2018 results in 12 TWh. Between 3 - 5,5 TWh of electricity are required to cover the technical potential. The GHG emissions abatement potential lays between 52 - 855 kt-CO2-eq. This could mean a reduction of up to 9% of total GHG emissions of the five sub-branches. Due to very high electricity costs and an absent carbon tax in industry in 2018, the most cost-effective scenario (50 MW HTHP in the best-case) is not cost-competitive with the optimized fossil-fuel benchmark. The levelized cost of heat (LCOH) for this scenario is 37 €/MWh, of which approximately 67% are stemming from electricity costs. With a carbon tax of min. 48 €/t-CO2-eq. the switch to an HTHP becomes cost-competitive (incl. maintenance and investment costs). With an expected increase in carbon taxation, less efficient scenarios become cost competitive. By reducing the electricity price by 50%, the best-case scenario with the large HTHP is cost-competitive without a carbon tax. Hence, there is a strong correlation between electricity price and cost-competitiveness of HTHPs. It is expected that the emission factor of the German electricity mix will decrease further in the future and strive towards zero in the long-term, which will lead to substantial increase of GHG emissions abatement potential. When the emission factor for electricity is reduced by 38%, the GHG emissions abatement potential lays at 16% of total GHG emissions of the five sub-branches. The timely investment into HTHPs drastically reduces the risk of sunken costs and makes industrial decarbonisation efforts in this decade attractive from an industrial perspective. Subsidies, carbon taxation, and the reduction of electricity prices by for example removing the German renewable energy levy (EEG) can contribute to making low-carbon technologies such as HTHPs more competitive to fossil-fuel infrastructure that run on fossil fuels with low prices in the industrial sector. Industrial decarbonisation is highly relevant in Germany due to the recent tightening of industrial decarbonisation targets and the systemic demonstration of HTHPs potentials crucial to achieving the latter.