Increasing urbanisation, changing disease scenarios, and current predictions of climate change impacts require innovative strategies for providing healthy and sustainable cities, now and in the future. The recently coined concept, Nature-based solutions (NBS), is one such strategy referring to actions that are inspired by, supported by, or copied from nature, designed to address a range of environmental challenges.

This paper reviews the empirical literature that provides a correlation between the different barriers to energy efficiency and consumer behavior related to two domains. It evaluates behavior related to energy curtailment, which represents routine, repetitive effort to decrease consumption on a day-to-day basis. It also considers behavior related to investments, which are one time actions such as purchasing new energy efficiency technologies. The paper also reviews the existing literature that assesses the effect of policies on energy use and investment in energy efficiency technologies.

This document is a tool designed to help organizations and policymakers around the world craft their own Roadmaps—published documents that detail the economic, jobs, environmental and security benefits of doubling energy productivity—that clearly articulate a target date for doubling energy productivity and detail achievable policy recommendations necessary to achieving the goal. Clean energy markets around the world are undergoing a revolution as countries, companies and citizens seek paths to a prosperous economic future that also protect the environment.

Low-income housing associations provide a unique opportunity for renewable energy installations, through potential scale of implementation sites, and in reducing social and financial costs to tenants. As an emerging field, a systematic review format was chosen as a method of providing a ‘state-of-the-art’ analysis for practitioners and researchers in the field of renewable energy and social housing applications. While literature reviews are common in analysis of energy applications across many fields, systematic reviews are much rarer.

It is clear that city must be part of the solution if an urbanizing world is to grapple successfully with ecological challenges such as energy depletion and climate change. A system dynamics model was developed in this study using STELLA platform to model the energy consumption and CO2 emission trends for the City of Beijing over 2005–2030. Results show that the total energy demand in Beijing is predicted to reach 114.30 million tonnes coal equivalent (Mtce) by 2030, while that value in 2005 is 55.99 Mtce, which is 1.04 times higher than the level in 2005.

The European construction industry, like many others, is confronted by an economy that isundergoing a highly significant change, shaped by megatrends such as greater urbanisation,disruptive new technologies and digitalisation, globalised value chains and sustainability.At the same time, the European economy faces the profound challenge of meeting theambitious climate mitigation goal set out in the Paris Agreement of keeping average globalwarming to well below 2˚C.

A majority of carbon dioxide is emitted from cities. However, due to the complexity of urban energy consumption behaviour and lack of sufficient data, the influencing mechanisms of urban energy efficiency has not been fully understood. This paper presents a systematic study to identify the key energy efficiency drivers related with major urban performance aspects, such as R&D, livability, etc. First, the performance indicators of 25 global cities are collected from the Global Power City Index (GPCI) report and other data sources.

Proposed changes flowing from the former Council of Australian Government’s Trajectory for Low Energy Buildings project1 (the trajectory) are expected to reduce annual electricity consumption of new and refurbished residential and commercial premises by 36 TWh by 2050, compared to current standards.

The Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) commissioned Energy in Buildings: 50 Best Practice Initiatives as a practical, user-friendly resource for property owners and managers, hoping that this will lead to greater awareness and implementation of initiatives across the property industry to reduce costs and emissions.

This article discusses China's economic development and political influence in the Middle East, and the construction of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It also discusses Xi Jinping's vision for relationships with the Middle East states as its natural partners, the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum (CASCF), the law of value, and the antagonistic contradictions China will encounter in its path to accumulation with US hegemony in the region.

Energy efficiency plays an important role in reducing the carbon externality from buildings, but economic analyses of more efficient, green building have thus far ignored input costs. This paper finds that the average marginal cost of green-labeled construction projects is smaller than the value premiums documented in the literature. However, design fees, representing just a fraction of development costs but paid largely up-front, are significantly higher for green construction projects. These projects also take longer to complete.

This paper outlines the approach and the cost-effectiveness potential for designing and retrofitting residential buildings to be energy-efficient in Bahrain. The analysis is focused on residential buildings since these buildings consume over 48% of the total electricity used in Bahrain. The optimization analysis has the benefit to assess both at the individual building and the national building stock levels, the potential of the application of currently proven measures and technologies to improve the energy efficiency of the building sector in Bahrain.

In-home displays, dynamic pricing, and automated devices aim to reduce residential electricity use—overall and during peak hours. We present a meta-analysis of 32 studies of the impacts of these interventions, conducted in the US or Canada. We find that methodological problems are common in the design of these studies, leading to artificially inflated results relative to what one would expect if the interventions were implemented in the general population.

This report sets out the positive and negative impacts of improvements in energy efficiency in buildings that could come about through a recast of the Energy Performance Buildings Directive (EPBD). Successive studies have shown that energy efficiency offers many of the most cost-effective options for meeting global emission targets. In many cases, energy efficiency measures have been shown to be ‘negative cost’, meaning that it would be economically advantageous to implement them.

The lack of progress on greenhouse-gas reduction at the global level has drawn attention to the need to strengthen support for energy-transition policies. One crucial component of such support is a better understanding of the political strategy of coalitions that support such policies.

Key messages 1. The Buildings sector of today has an oversized ecological footprint. The buildings sector is the single largest contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), with approximately one third of global energy end use taking place within buildings. Furthermore, the construction sector is responsible for more than a third of global resource consumption, including 12 per cent of all fresh water use and significantly contributes to the generation of solid waste, estimated at 40 per cent of the total volume.

Energy efficiency policies have the unique capacity to contribute to a more sustainable energy future at an economic net benefit even when co-benefits are not included in the evaluations. The purpose of this paper is to present quantitative and comparative information on the societal cost-effectiveness and the lifetime energy savings of all light eight building energy efficiency policy instruments.

A new analysis framework is developed and applied to assess the benefits of building energy efficiency policies and programs. One of the main advantages of the new energy productivity analysis is that it accounts for both economic and energy performances of energy efficiency actions using only one metric. Specifically, the approach applies the concept of energy productivity to the building sector and accounts for both value added and energy savings of energy efficiency measures.