Building Sufficiency : Unlocking the sufficiency potential of the Swiss residential building stock to reach net-zero emissions

Abstract

According to the emission paths in Switzerland’s Long-Term Climate Strategy based on the Swiss Federal Office of Energy’s (SFOE) Energy Perspectives 2050+ the Swiss building stock should no longer generate any greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Public policies have mainly focused on increasing efficiency and integrating renewables in the building sector. However, shifting from efficiency-driven approaches to the SER framework, sufficiency, efficiency, and renewable energy, may be essential to mitigating the effort and financial burden of extensive retrofitting (Saheb, 2021). Only a few countries are currently considering sufficiency as a policy strategy. The sixth IPCC assessment report has highlighted the role of sufficiency to reduce the demand for building materials and appliances throughout a building’s life cycle for the first time. The concept of sufficiency promotes lifestyles and regulations that cap and evenly distribute the demand for energy, land, and natural resources, aiming to ensure well-being within planetary limits (Shukla et al., 2022). In wealthier countries, individual consumption of resources exceeds what is necessary according to Decent Living Standards (DLS) (Millward-Hopkins et al., 2020; Rao and Min, 2018)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. [...]