Policy Briefs
POLICY BRIEF 1:
Household Energy Efficiency Measures – Shortcomings and Opportunities
Households are an important target for energy efficiency improvements, because energy consumption tends to continue in the residential sector. The impact of energy efficiency policies depends not only on the local or national circumstances and the policy instrument mix chosen, but also on the process of instrument design and implementation. In this policy brief we have listed success factors, which help decision makers to effectively support energy efficiency in households.
See also Deliverables D5.1 & D5.2
POLICY BRIEF 2:
Informing Energy Efficiency Policies: Methodological Stumbling Blocks
Defining targets for the energy performance of economies should be based on insights derived from an integrated analysis across different levels of organization of the economic process. This requires an effective characterization of the national energy metabolism; an effective characterization of the openness of the various economic (sub)sectors to assess the effects of externalization on local performance and moving from the (too) simplistic concept of efficiency (unable of handling multi-scale analysis) to the concept of multi-level energy performance. In order to achieve these results a reorganization of categories of official statistical accounting is of paramount importance.
See also Deliverables D4.1 & D4.2
POLICY BRIEF 3:
How to Assess the Energy Performance of Cities?
To handle the problem of urban (in)sustainability we must abandon business as usual and embrace the philosophy of complexity by developing and using tools that can identify and characterize policy relevant issues. In this context, it is important to characterize simultaneously different scales, levels and dimensions of analysis; generate information that is transparent and co-produced in participatory processes; generate contextualized and comparable information, such as metabolic rates and densities for economic (sub)sectors and activities, in order to identify best practices among cities. MuSIASEM’s energy end-use matrix for cities is a promising step into this direction.
>> EUFORIE Policy Brief #3
>> Policy Brief 3 in Catalan: El metabolisme urbà e Barcelona des d’un enfoc multi-nivell
See also Deliverable D4.3
POLICY BRIEF 4:
Sustainability performance indicators for energy and raw material use, and environmental impacts
The sustainability performance indicators developed in the EUFORIE project take the most important drivers into account. They combine information about changes in intensity and activity into two indicators. The performance indicators are sustainable growth (SG) and sustainable intensity (SI). The sustainability criterion is relative: energy consumption, material consumption, and environmental impacts should not increase from the reference level. SG and SI describe if the performance of the studied system between two time moments is towards sustainability or away from it. Annual changes and change after a fixed base year of the performance are typical analyses.
See also Deliverable 6.2