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Mar 30

PAPER: Coupling circularity performance and climate action: From disciplinary silos to transdisciplinary modelling science

This paper addresses the following question: How can smart energy management system (SEMS) influence the residential electricity consumption at both individual household and national level? First, we developed an hourly optimization model for individual households. The energy cost of an individual household is minimized under given assumptions on outside temperature, radiation, (dynamic) electricity price, and feed-in tariff. By comparing the optimization to the reference scenario, we show the impact of SEMS on grid-electricity consumption and photovoltaic (PV) self-consumption at the individual household CTechnological breakthroughs and policy measures targeting energy efficiency and clean energy alone will not suffice to deliver Paris Agreement-compliant greenhouse gas emissions trajectories in the next decades. Strong cases have recently been made for acknowledging the decarbonisation potential lying in transforming linear economic models into closed-loop industrial ecosystems and in shifting lifestyle patterns towards this direction. This perspective highlights the research capacity needed to inform on the role and potential of the circular economy for climate change mitigation and to enhance the scientific capabilities to quantitatively explore their synergies and trade-offs. This begins with establishing conceptual and methodological bridges amongst the relevant and currently fragmented research communities, thereby allowing an interdisciplinary integration and assessment of circularity, decarbonisation, and sustainable development. Following similar calls for science in support of climate action, a transdisciplinary scientific agenda is needed to co-create the goals and scientific processes underpinning the transition pathways towards a circular, net-zero economy with representatives from policy, industry, and civil society. Here, it is argued that such integration of disciplines, methods, and communities can then lead to new and/or structurally enhanced quantitative systems models that better represent critical industrial value chains, consumption patterns, and mitigation technologies. This will be a crucial advancement towards assessing the material implications of, and the contribution of enhanced circularity performance to, mitigation pathways that are compatible with the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement and the transition to a circular economy.

Alexandros Nikas, Georgios Xexakis, Konstantinos Koasidis, José Acosta-Fernández, Iñaki Arto, Alvaro Calzadilla, Teresa Domenech, Ajay Gambhir, Stefan Giljum, Mikel Gonzalez-Eguino, Andrea Herbst, Olga Ivanova, Mariësse A. E. van Sluisveld, Dirk-Jan Van De Ven, Anastasios Karamaneas, Haris Doukas,
Coupling circularity performance and climate action: From disciplinary silos to transdisciplinary modelling science, Sustainable Production and Consumption, Volume 30, 2022, Pages 269-277

Full article available here