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Towards demand-side solutions for mitigating climate change

Nature Climate Change volume 8, pages 260–263 (2018)Cite this article

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Research on climate change mitigation tends to focus on supply-side technology solutions. A better understanding of demand-side solutions is missing. We propose a transdisciplinary approach to identify demand-side climate solutions, investigate their mitigation potential, detail policy measures and assess their implications for well-being.

The upcoming sixth assessment report, AR6, of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will feature a chapter on demand, services and social aspects of mitigation (Chapter 5, Working Group III). This focus on demand promises to integrate scientific knowledge from diverse and underrepresented disciplines. Previous IPCC reports emphasized improved end-use efficiency but provided little insight into the nature, scale, implementation and implications of demand-side solutions, and ignored associated changes in lifestyles, social norms and well-being. There are promising disciplinary frameworks to estimate demand-side, consumption-based or lifestyle-based approaches for climate change mitigation1,2,3,4,5, but a comprehensive assessment of the underlying science and methods needed to provide realistic assessments of their potential is still missing, because of competing frameworks and paradigms, lack of research synthesis (compare with ref. 6) and predominant focus on techno-economic scenarios within the IPCC framing. This gap is unfortunate, as demand-side solutions entail fewer environmental risks than many supply-side technologies7.

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Acknowledgements

W.B.d.B. acknowledges financial support from the Swedish Foundation for the Humanities and the Social Sciences; J.K.S. and F.W.G. from the UK ESRC (ES/K006576/1 and EP/K011790/1); C.H. from the Oxford Martin School; O.Y.E. and M.T. from the EU ERC (no. 154 336155) and N.D.R. from the EU ERC (no. 637462); I.M.L.A. from the Center for Climate and Energy Decision Making (SES-1463492); J.C.M. from the German Ministry of Research and Education (03EK3046B) and L.M. from the German Academic Exchange Service.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change, Berlin, Germany

    Felix Creutzig, William F. Lamb, Jan C. Minx & Anjali Ramakrishnan

  2. Sustainability Economics of Human Settlements, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Felix Creutzig & Anjali Ramakrishnan

  3. Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India

    Joyashree Roy

  4. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Inês M. L. Azevedo & Wändi Bruine de Bruin

  5. University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    Wändi Bruine de Bruin, Jan C. Minx & Julia K. Steinberger

  6. Partnership on Sustainable, Low-Carbon Transport, Berlin, Germany

    Holger Dalkmann

  7. Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei, Milan, Italy

    Oreane Y. Edelenbosch & Massimo Tavoni

  8. University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Frank W. Geels

  9. International Institute for Advanced Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria

    Arnulf Grubler & Narasimha D. Rao

  10. University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Cameron Hepburn & Linus Mattauch

  11. School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Edgar G. Hertwich

  12. Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, India

    Radhika Khosla

  13. Central European University, Budapest, Hungary

    Diana Ürge-Vorsatz

  14. Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    Elke U. Weber

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  1. Felix Creutzig
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Correspondence to Felix Creutzig.

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Creutzig, F., Roy, J., Lamb, W.F. et al. Towards demand-side solutions for mitigating climate change. Nature Clim Change 8, 260–263 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0121-1

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