Prioritizing Climate Solutions by Resource Use

🚧 Stop Building More—Start Using What We Have The building sector is one of the biggest drivers of climate collapse and global injustice—not because we lack homes, but because wealthy countries refuse to stop expanding. 📌 The hard truth: 🔹 The biggest driver of resource consumption isn’t population growth—it’s floor area expansion per capita, mostly in the Global North. 🔹 The building sector is responsible for 21% of global emissions, 50% of extracted materials, and 30% of global waste. 🔹 Even if construction reaches “net-zero,” it will still exceed planetary boundaries unless total environmental footprint is cut in half. 🔹 Efforts to increase efficiency, switch to renewables, and recycle materials have FAILED to reduce emissions—because they enable more construction instead of reducing demand. 🔹 We cannot build our way out of a crisis caused by overconsumption. 💡 The solution? Stop overbuilding. Start reusing. Europe already has more than enough buildings: ✅ France: 172% of annual new housing demand could be met by repurposing vacant and underused buildings. ✅ Germany: Up to 348% of new construction could be avoided through sufficiency measures. ✅ Denmark: Housing demand can be met without expanding the built environment. 🚨 New construction locks in carbon emissions, land use, and resource extraction for decades. Instead of endless expansion, we must: ✅ Stop speculative new construction—build only when absolutely necessary. ✅ Prioritize renovation over demolition. ✅ Redistribute and repurpose existing buildings. ✅ Reduce total floor area per person to fit within planetary boundaries. 📢 Housing is not a luxury—it’s a necessity. But the Global North’s overconsumption prevents others from meeting their basic needs. 🔎 If Europe stops overbuilding, resources and carbon space can be freed up for those who actually need them. 💡 More for those who need it. Less for those who have too much. 📖 Read the full scientific literature here: Sufficiency and the Built Environment | GlobalABC Sufficiency in the building sector for the whole life carbon roadmap - final report > BPIE - Buildings Performance Institute Europe Developing sufficiency-based sharing principles for absolute environmental sustainability assessment using decent living standards and planetary boundaries - ScienceDirect

Why leverage avoided emissions ? #scope4 creates value? 1) to maximize its avoided emissions, a heat pump manufacturer can benefit from targeting customers equipped with the most carbon-intensive heating solutions to displace as much fossil energy as possible. 2) A shared car service provider can target cities where the use of cars for short trips is prevalent rather than cities with extensive use of good quality public transportation. Altogether, avoided emissions can be the right incentive for companies to focus on the right climate solutions and the right markets. For #enterprise: By enabling the quantification of climate-related benefits, avoided emissions assessments can provide leading companies (i.e., first movers) with the necessary platform to develop and scale solutions in markets with the highest decarbonization potential, resulting in a new type of climate leadership and value creation. For Investors: Investors and financial actors wishing to move beyond investees' #GHG emissions and associated risks can leverage avoided emissions to understand and quantify the #netzero aligned opportunities associated with current and future investment decisions. Avoided emissions assessments can provide investors with this additional opportunity-oriented lens. This can help them identify, assess, and ultimately invest in companies that are future-proofing their businesses by leading the #greentransition and driving #decarbonization with their solutions. For policymakers: Governing bodies can leverage avoided emissions at two complementary levels: Prioritizing government action, i.e., to support the identification of the most relevant decarbonizing solutions to be deployed in a given area or, alternatively, the areas to be prioritized for selected decarbonizing solutions or actions. Supporting policy mechanisms (e.g., incentivization mechanisms, regulation) to speed up decarbonization efforts from businesses as well as through innovation. This is particularly relevant in the context of regulations aimed at incentivizing the most efficient solutions - avoided emissions-based regulations could incorporate a dynamic element to the regulations by basing these on the evolving market averages or identified best-in-class solutions (e.g., the most energy-efficient solution on a 3-year period becoming the energy efficiency threshold for that type of solution the next 3-year period).

When we face extreme heat, the common advice is: “Buy an air conditioner,” “Get a cooler,” or “Use a fan.” These responses feel intuitive—because they reflect the solutions we already know. But what happens when there is no stable electricity? When power bills are unaffordable? When the home is a single-room structure with a tin roof where an AC simply won’t work? This disconnect reveals a deeper issue. Across climate, energy, and air pollution challenges, we often propose solutions that assume supportive systems—electricity, finance, infrastructure—already exist. But in much of the Global South, these systems are fragmented, missing, or inaccessible. Our intentions may be good, but without asking uncomfortable questions, we risk recommending tools that are simply unusable. This isn’t a rejection of innovation. It’s a call for critical prioritization. We often hear that “all work is important.” And while that’s true, we must also ask: Important for whom? At what time scale? And under what conditions? A long-term research breakthrough and a short-term cooling shelter both matter—but they serve different purposes. When working with communities facing urgent risks, feasibility, timing, and equity must guide our actions. These are not abstract concerns. For hundreds of millions across the Global South, this is daily life. Many climate “solutions” today are designed with assumptions—reliable electricity, formal housing, affordable energy, inclusive financing. Without these foundations, such solutions become products of privilege, not tools of resilience. We don’t need just more solutions. We need a fundamental shift in how we define them. That means moving beyond innovation-as-default, and toward a systems approach—one that centers lived reality, works within real-world constraints, and builds long-term capability. Resilience doesn’t begin with what we can deploy. It begins with what people can sustain. Ajay Nagpure

A new report from the Earth Commission ( 👉https://lnkd.in/eJbAZxiR), I think more outspoken on what should be done to get to 🌍 𝐀 𝐉𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝 𝐨𝐧 𝐚 𝐒𝐚𝐟𝐞 𝐏𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐞𝐭: 𝐔𝐫𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐒𝐨𝐥𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐆𝐥𝐨𝐛𝐚𝐥 𝐇𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐭𝐡 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐒𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 🌱 A quote: "𝚄𝚗𝚎𝚚𝚞𝚊𝚕 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚎𝚡𝚌𝚎𝚜𝚜𝚒𝚟𝚎 𝚙𝚎𝚛𝚜𝚘𝚗𝚊𝚕 𝚌𝚘𝚗𝚜𝚞𝚖𝚙𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗 𝚒𝚜 𝚛𝚘𝚘𝚝𝚎𝚍 𝚒𝚗 𝚎𝚌𝚘𝚗𝚘𝚖𝚒𝚌 𝚜𝚢𝚜𝚝𝚎𝚖𝚜." This report is way too much to make a summary here. A breakdown of the key solutions and transitions we need to prioritize: 🌟 Key Solutions and Transitions: 🔘 Defining Safe and Just Earth-System Boundaries (ESBs): The report identifies eight ESBs across climate, freshwater, biosphere, nutrient cycles, and air quality, emphasizing that seven have already been breached. To reverse this, we need immediate action on multiple fronts, including rebalancing resource use and restoring natural ecosystems. 🔘Operationalizing Change at Multiple Levels: It's not enough to set global targets. Solutions must be translated across scales—from local to global actors, especially in cities and businesses that have the power to act swiftly. Cross-scale translation, coupled with equitable resource sharing, is essential to ensuring that justice accompanies sustainability. 🔘Systemic Transformations: Moving forward requires reimagining how we produce food, manage energy, and govern resources. This means a shift from the extractive economies driving our current crises toward regenerative models that balance human needs with the planet’s boundaries. The report underscores the importance of redistributing natural resources, moving away from a model of endless economic growth to one that emphasizes human and ecological well-being. This aligns with post-growth thinking, which advocates for reduced consumption, especially in high-income regions, and a transition toward more sustainable and equitable resource distribution. The evidence is undeniable—we are operating outside safe planetary boundaries, risking both human health and Earth’s ecosystems. Incremental changes will not suffice. We need bold, radical transformations that prioritize justice, equity, and sustainability to ensure a thriving planet for future generations. 🌱🌎

Carbon removal technologies are being "misused" to offset emissions that could be eliminated through existing solutions. Recent climate models show carbon dioxide removal (CDR) will be essential for achieving net-zero emissions, particularly for hard-to-abate sectors like steel production and aviation. However, current deployment patterns suggest we're not optimizing this critical technology for its most necessary applications. New research analyzing 81 climate scenarios reveals that 78 would require all available sustainable CDR capacity to compensate for hard-to-abate emissions and temperature overshoot. The study found that by 2050, scenarios averaged 7 Gt/year of CDR while requiring 13 Gt/year of residual emissions reductions. Most concerning, 95% of examined scenarios exceed estimated sustainable limits for land-based CDR. This research suggests moving CDR resources away from offsetting easily reducible emissions and deploying them for truly hard-to-abate sectors. Suppliers, buyers, and policymakers should prioritize direct emissions reductions in sectors with available solutions while saving CDR for industries where decarbonization remains technically challenging. But let's first get to a CDR industry at 7 Gt/year. S/O to Drew Shindell and Joeri Rogelj for this paper. Cc Climeworks, Exomad Green, Vaulted Deep, 1PointFive, etc.