Green Public Procurement (GPP) is an important tool to achieve environmental policy goals relating to climate change, resource use and sustainable consumption and production – especially given the importance of public sector spending on goods and services in Europe.

Energy is a complicated topic, and energy performance can also be challenging to determine. This book is about understanding and shaping energy performance of an entire economic sector, using the residential sector as the example, although not at a detailed level. The historical record of attempts to reduce energy use or carbon emissions of countries and the world is primarily one of failure. Should the response to continued failure be to continue to do more of the same? Insanity is sometimes defined in such a manner.

China has made energy conservation and energy efficiency one of its top priorities as a means of guiding its economic and social development. In the past three decades, while China’s economy increased eighteen‑fold, energy consumption increased only five‑fold. The energy intensity of China’s GDP declined by about seventy percent during the same period. In the face of resource and environmental constraints, China vowed to make energy conservation a foundation of its economic and social development strategy, as well as its energy and climate change strategy.

Policies that promote green growth need to be founded on a good understanding of the determinants of green growth and need to be supported with appropriate indicators to monitor progress. This book is an update of the 2014 edition.

Delivering the quality of growth to which citizens aspire requires concerted action across countries and within ministries invested in green growth – finance, economy, industry, trade and agriculture, among others.

This document is the companion to parts 1 and 2 of the guidance on how to use Level(s). In part 1 a general introduction to Level(s) is provided, together with in Part 2 an overview of the macro-objectives, performance indicators and the three Levels of performance assessment (Level(s) - Part 1 and 2). The three Levels are:

This book uses energy and economic models to assess the potential for further energy-efficient improvements in the transport, building, industry and power sectors of China. The report starts with a modelling assessment of the role of energy efficiency in supporting China to achieve its Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC) of reaching a peak in its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by around 2030.

Economic development will lead to higher demand for various end-use goods and services in India. Energy-efficient technologies provide a way forward to achieve economic growth at relatively lower costs due to associated multiple benefits such as resource conservation, lower energy consumption, higher productivity and lower emissions intensity per unit of output.

The report undertakes the following analysis to identify High Impact Opportunities (HIOs):

Cities are increasingly taking actions such as building code enforcement, urban planning, and public transit expansion to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide in their communities and municipal operations. However, many cities lack the quantitative information needed to estimate policy impacts and prioritize city actions in terms of carbon abatement potential and cost effectiveness. This report fills this research gap by providing methodologies to assess the carbon abatement potential of a variety of city actions.

The growing per capita income in India is expected to increase the demand for various energy-consuming products and services among Indian households. Enhancing energy efficiency remains one of the cheapest options to “produce” energy in India, as the efficiency of many energy systems has a large scope for improvement, and as this option plays an important part in enhancing India’s energy security.

This report is the Interim Technical Report for the Building Code Energy Performance Trajectory Project. It accompanies the Interim Synthesis Report for the Building Code Energy Performance Trajectory Project, entitled The Bottom Line – the household impacts of delaying improved energy requirements in the Building Code and which was published on the 8th of February 2018, providing more detail on the assumptions behind and the preliminary results from the underlying modelling work.

The report provides the following key items:

In 2017, New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) developed its 2016 Stretch Code Supplement to the 2016 New York State Energy Conservation Construction Code. Since 2017, NYSERDA has continued to develop the 2018 edition, as part of the efforts to achieve a statewide Net Zero Energy Code by 2028.

This report is a product of the collaborative research project ‘Validating and Improving the BASIX Assessment Tool for Low-Carbon Dwellings’. Initiated by the Cooperative Research Centre for Low Carbon Living, the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and the New South Wales Government, this project addresses the policy need for post-occupancy evaluation of the BASIX tool by measuring the actual energy consumption of BASIX-compliant dwellings.