Demand side climate change mitigation actions and SDGs: literature review with systematic evidence search

Abstract

To strengthen current discourse on acceleration and scale up of the emissions mitigation actions by sector-specific demand side actions, information on the intersection of three dimensions becomes useful. First, what kind of actions help in avoiding, shifting and improving demand for activities/services and resultant emissions to help in deciding choices for actions; second, how these three categories of actions are linked to the wider impact on human wellbeing represented by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) framework; and third, who are the actors associated with these mitigation actions. These three steps become important in the targeted scaling up of actions through policy interventions. This study undertakes a review of the literature between 2015 and 2020 with systematic evidence searching and screening. The literature search has been conducted in Scopus Database. From over 6887 literature in the initial search, 294 relevant literature were finally reviewed to link demand side interventions of avoid-shift-improve (ASI) categories to SDGs. It also maps these actions to actors who can lead the changes. Results show that a wide range of improvement actions are already helping in incremental steps to reduce demand and emissions in various services like mobility, shelter and industrial products. However, ASI categories provide more distinct mitigation actions. All actions need support of innovation, infrastructure development and industrialization. Actions that interact with several SDGs include active mode of transport, passive building design, cleaner cooking, and circular economy. Positive links of these actions to multiple SDGs are overall very strong; however, few trade-offs have been observed. These are mostly related to distributional impact across social groups which highlight the need for policy attention and hard infrastructure design changes. Mitigation and wider benefit outcomes cannot be achieved by individual or household level actions alone. They require the involvement of multiple actors, interconnected actions in sequence as well as in parallel, and support of hard infrastructure. Our results show that in mobility services, policy makers supported by spatial planners and service delivery providers are the major actors. In industry, major actors are policy makers followed by spatial planners and innovators. For buildings, key actors include spatial planners followed by policy makers. Besides these, strategic information sharing to enhance user awareness and education plays an important role in shaping behaviour. Digitalization, information and communication, and interactive technologies will play a significant role in understanding and modifying people’s choices; however, these would also require regulatory attention.

Keywords

• SDG
• industry
• transport
• buildings
• avoid-shift-improve
• actor