Parametric Study on Sufficiency Measures of Residential Buildings in Zurich

Abstract

Greenhouse gas emissions needs to be reduced in order to meet the carbon budget for limiting global warming. A significant share of emissions comes from the residential building sector and therefore needs to be reduced. In order to bring the development of the residential building in line with the limited CO2 budget, this work simulates the development of the residential building sector from 2021 until 2050 with a top down approach. In contrast to previous studies, not only the operational emissions but also the entire life cycle of the building, i.e. embodied emissions are considered. This allows the model to simulate the residential building sector in its entirety. One main focus is on sufficiency measures, as the previous research in this sector focused mainly on efficiency and consistency.
However, this model allows different scenarios and developments to be examined in detail. A parallel coordinate plot is provided as a tool for forecasting the residential building sector until 2050 according to different assumptions. The simulation showed, that if we continue as in 2020, a warming potential of 2.1 ◦C and still high emissions will be reached in 2050. Our model indicates that the global warming potential could be limited to 1.65 ◦C in the best case. On the other hand, it will reach a warming potential of 2.4 ◦C in the worst case by 2050. A sensitivity analysis delivers information about the influence of the variable parameters on emissions reduction. The various sufficiency measures are then considered in detail.

Finally, ambitious but realistic scenarios are presented on how the warming potential can be limited to 1.75 ◦C and 1.8 ◦C.