While the buildings sector is directly responsible for about 10% of Austria’s anthropogenic CO2 emissions, its carbon footprint is 3 to 4 times larger than that if indirect and life-cycle emissions are considered (dependent on the accounting method). In that regard, Austria’s building sector is representative of building sectors of other countries in the European Union. Moreover, the CO2 emissions attributed to the global building stock are structured in a similar way. Thus, due to its interlinkages with other sectors (notably energy generation and industry), building stock provides effective leverage points that are of critical importance for global and national mitigation efforts, and for a successful transition to carbon-neutral economy.  

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Energy efficiency of Austria’s building stock has been steadily improving since 1990s, resulting in declining CO2 emissions from operating residential and non-residential buildings, despite slight increases in final energy consumption. However, these improvements were only incremental. Current measures and policies fall far short from being in line with the global warming targets of the Paris agreement, and from conforming with emission reduction targets mandated by the EU Climate Law, which mandates that the buildings sector will have to decrease its CO2 emissions by approximately 50% by 2030 (relative to current levels) and to achieve climate neutrality by 2050.  Meeting these challenging goals require a thorough and concerted transformation of the building stock, of energy systems supporting its operation, and of industries providing material inputs for construction, renovation, and maintenance of buildings. Thus, designing policies for decarbonization of the buildings sector must adopt a holistic, system-based approach, which recognizes direct, indirect, and embodied emissions from this sector, as well as the important, though obscure, role that buildings play in Austria’s economy.

Objectives:

The goal of the project is to develop packages of comprehensive measures necessary to transform the buildings sector while staying within the constraints imposed by the EU’s GHG emission reduction policies and, more broadly, with the global warming targets of Paris agreement. The project will achieve this goal through a structural analysis of Austria’s building stock, energy and material flows, related economic activities, and institutional arrangements. Transformation pathways will be charted taking advantage of leverage points with, and synergies across, physical, institutional, and economic dimensions of the transformation challenge. To this end, the project will focus on three layers of the problem:

  • The physical layer will focus on the spatial distribution, energy efficiency, age structure and purposes of the existing building stock as well as on material and energy flows needed for its maintenance and operation. It will investigate options for renovation and re-purposing of the existing buildings, potentials of new designs, alternative materials and other low-carbon technologies, and scenarios of land-use changes and of restructuring the supporting infrastructure (e.g., electricity grids, district heating). The result will be the projection of environmental impact reduction potentials of the considered packages of transformation measures.
  • The institutional layer will assess which regulatory or legal framework conditions facilitate transition to climate-neutral building sector and which constitute barriers that will have to be overcome.
  • In the economic layer, the economy-wide consequences of the scenarios of the building sector transformation, including employment, distributional effects, potential price changes, and financial stability of the economic system will be modelled and will provide a quantitative economic assessment for the transition pathways.

IIASA Contributions to the Project:

  • Analysis of current direct, indirect and life-cycle CO2 emissions attributed to Austria’s buildings sector, and assessment of the carbon budget for the buildings sector that is consistent with international mitigation efforts and global warming targets.
  • Simulations of economy-wide consequences of transformation of the building sector with use of the novel full-scale input-output agent-based model of Austria's economy.

Research Partners:

Funder: