Innovative financing models for low carbon transitions: Exploring the case for revolving funds for domestic energy efficiency programmes

The IEA has estimated that over the next four decades US$31 trillion will be required to promote energy efficiency in buildings. However, the opportunities to make such investments are often constrained, particularly in contexts of austerity. We consider the potential of revolving funds as an innovative financing mechanism that could reduce investment requirements and enhance investment impacts by recovering and reinvesting some of the savings generated by early investments. Such funds have been created in various contexts, but there has never been a formal academic evaluation of their potential to contribute to low carbon transitions. To address this, we propose a generic revolving fund model and apply it using data on the costs and benefits of domestic sector retrofit in the UK. We find that a revolving fund could reduce the costs of domestic sector retrofit in the UK by 26%, or £9 billion, whilst also making such a scheme cost-neutral, albeit with significant up-front investments that would only pay for themselves over an extended period of time. We conclude that revolving funds could enable countries with limited resources to invest more heavily and more effectively in low carbon development, even in contexts of austerity

Uncovering Blind Spots in Urban Carbon Management: The Role of Consumption-Based Carbon Accounting in Bristol, UK

The rapid urbanisation of the twentieth century, along with the spread of high-consumption urban lifestyles, has led to cities becoming the dominant drivers of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Reducing these impacts is crucial, but production-based frameworks of carbon measurement and mitigation—which encompass only a limited part of cities’ carbon footprints—are much more developed and widely applied than consumption-based approaches that consider the embedded carbon effectively imported into a city. Frequently, therefore, cities are left blind to the importance of their wider consumption-related climate impacts, while at the same time left lacking effective tools to reduce them. To explore the relevance of these issues, we implement methodologies for assessing production- and consumption-based emissions at the city-level and estimate the associated emissions trajectories for Bristol, a major UK city, from 2000 to 2035. We develop mitigation scenarios targeted at reducing the former, considering potential energy, carbon and financial savings in each case. We then compare these mitigation potentials with local government ambitions and Bristol’s consumption-based emissions trajectory. Our results suggest that the city’s consumption-based emissions are three times the production-based emissions, largely due to the impacts of imported food and drink. We find that low-carbon investments of circa £3 billion could reduce production-based emissions by 25% in 2035. However, we also find that this represents <10% of Bristol’s forecast consumption-based emissions for 2035 and is approximately equal to the mitigation achievable by eliminating the city’s current levels of food waste. Such observations suggest that incorporating consumption-based emission statistics into cities’ accounting and decision-making processes could uncover largely unrecognised opportunities for mitigation that are likely to be essential for achieving deep decarbonisation

Metrics for optimising the multi-dimensional value of resources recovered from waste in a circular economy: A critical review

© 2017 The Authors - Established assessment methods focusing on resource recovery from waste within a circular economy context consider few or even a single domain/s of value, i.e. environmental, economic, social and technical domains. This partial approach often delivers misleading messages for policy- and decision-makers. It fails to accurately represent systems complexity, and obscures impacts, trade-offs and problem shifting that resource recovery processes or systems intended to promote circular economy may cause. Here, we challenge such partial approaches by critically reviewing the existing suite of environmental, economic, social and technical metrics that have been regularly observed and used in waste management and resource recovery systems' assessment studies, upstream and downstream of the point where waste is generated. We assess the potential of those metrics to evaluate ‘complex value’ of materials, components and products, i.e., the holistic sum of their environmental, economic, social and technical benefits and impacts across the system. Findings suggest that the way resource recovery systems are assessed and evaluated require simplicity, yet must retain a suitable minimum level of detail across all domains of value, which is pivotal for enabling sound decision-making processes. Criteria for defining a suitable set of metrics for assessing resource recovery from waste require them to be simple, transparent and easy to measure, and be both system- and stakeholder-specific. Future developments must focus on providing a framework for the selection of metrics that accurately describe (or at least reliably proxy for) benefits and impacts across all domains of value, enabling effective and transparent analysis of resource recovery form waste in circular economy systems.We gratefully acknowledge support of the UK Natural Environ-ment Research Council (NERC) and the UK Economic and SocialResearch Council (ESRC) who funded this work in the context of‘Complex Value Optimisation for Resource Recovery’(CVORR)project (Grant No. NE/L014149/1)

Providing decent living with minimum energy: A global scenario

It is increasingly clear that averting ecological breakdown will require drastic changes to contemporary human society and the global economy embedded within it. On the other hand, 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. However, such a world requires a massive rollout of advanced technologies across all sectors, as well as radical demand-side changes to reduce consumption – regardless of income – to levels of sufficiency. Sufficiency is, however, far more materially generous in our model than what those opposed to strong reductions in consumption often assume

Fully integrated modelling for sustainability assessment of resource recovery from waste

This paper presents an integrated modelling approach for value assessments, focusing on resource recovery from waste. The method tracks and forecasts a range of values across environmental, social, economic and technical domains by attaching these to material-flows, thus building upon and integrating unidimensional models such as material flow analysis (MFA) and lifecycle assessment (LCA). We argue that the usual classification of metrics into these separate domains is useful for interpreting the outputs of multidimensional assessments, but unnecessary for modelling. We thus suggest that multidimensional assessments can be better performed by integrating the calculation methods of unidimensional models rather than their outputs. To achieve this, we propose a new metric typology that forms the foundation of a multidimensional model. This enables dynamic simulations to be performed with material-flows (or values in any domain) driven by changes in value in other domains. We then apply the model in an illustrative case highlighting links between the UK coal-based electricity-production and concrete/cement industries, investigating potential impacts that may follow the increased use of low-carbon fuels (biomass and solid recovered fuels; SRF) in the former. We explore synergies and trade-offs in value across domains and regions, e.g. how changes in carbon emissions in one part of the system may affect mortality elsewhere. This highlights the advantages of recognising complex system dynamics and making high-level inferences of their effects, even when rigorous analysis is not possible. We also indicate how changes in social, environmental and economic ‘values’ can be understood as being driven by changes in the technical value of resources. Our work thus emphasises the advantages of building fully integrated models to inform conventional sustainability assessments, rather than applying hybrid approaches that integrate outputs from parallel models. The approach we present demonstrates that this is feasible and lays the foundations for such an integrated model.UK's Natural Environment Research Council (NERC); Department for Environment; Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA);Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC