Felix Creutzig

Technische Universität Berlin | TUB · Institut für Landschaftsarchitektur und Umweltplanung

In China, like in other countries, smart cities have been proposed to make cities more efficient and, ideally, also more sustainable and low-carbon. Unlike other countries, China pursued a smart city strategy since 2008 with substantial funding and intermediate goals, resulting in high data and computational-intensive digital infrastructures in som...

Shortages of skilled workers and special expertise in the crafts and trades hamper the implementation of low-carbon transitions in many countries. However, research on effective governance arrangements targeting this ‘installation bottleneck’ is limited. To fill this gap, we adopt a Middle-Out Perspective (MOP) and use rich qualitative data includi...

We argue for systematically integrating behavioral sciences and urban planning to develop a joint agenda for research and planning practice. By viewing urban form as a critical choice architecture for making people’s choices more climate-friendly, this approach may unlock new pathways for higher liveability of cities.

In face of the climate emergency and growing challenges ranging from pollution to traffic jams, ride pooling has been floated as a potential solution for less congested, low-carbon and more space-efficient urban transport. However, it is unclear which system configurations enable an economically viable case for shared pooled mobility. To gain a bet...

Artificial intelligence is rapidly being integrated into Earth science, but how Earth science may benefit artificial intelligence has been overlooked. We call for mutual balancing between the two disciplines and improving cross-disciplinary collaboration. The increasing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in various fields of Earth science (ES...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will prepare a special report (SR) during the 7th assessment report (AR7) cycle to summarise climate change evidence in cities. Here, we provide a systematic overview of topics in 55,000 urban studies using machine learning. We show that urban research is growing faster than other climate change...

Rising global greenhouse gas emissions from the transport sector pose a major challenge to meeting the targets of the Paris Agreement. This raises questions of how technology, infrastructure and societal trends and policies can influence transport demand and thus also emissions, energy demand and service levels. Here, we review the literature on fa...

Cities and other human settlements are major contributors to climate change and are highly vulnerable to its impacts. They are also uniquely positioned to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and lead adaptation efforts. These compound challenges and opportunities require a comprehensive perspective on the public policy of human settlements. Drawing on...

This pre-print is now published here, with the final title: "Demand-side strategies key for mitigating material impacts of energy transitions" --> https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-024-02016-z As societies abandon fossil fuels in favor of renewable energy, electric cars and other low-carbon technologies, environmental pressures shift from atmospheric...

As fossil fuels are phased out in favour of renewable energy, electric cars and other low-carbon technologies, the future clean energy system is likely to require less overall mining than the current fossil-fuelled system. However, material extraction and waste flows, new infrastructure development, land-use change, and the provision of new types o...

Shared pooled mobility has been hailed as a sustainable mobility solution that uses digital innovation to efficiently bundle rides. Multiple disciplines have started investigating and analyzing shared pooled mobility systems. However, there is a lack of cross-community communication making it hard to build upon knowledge from other fields or know w...

To tackle the climate crisis, cities must reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions rapidly. To aid these efforts, many cities are interested in leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML). Researchers and practitioners, however, only begin to understand how ML can contribute to achieving climate targets in urban contexts. To provide a...

Here, with the aim of supporting the path to achieving net-zero emissions in cities, we assess the existing literature on carbon dioxide removal (CDR) at the urban scale, seeking to quantify the potential negative emissions contribution of cities globally. Urban CDR options considered here include the storage of carbon in urban vegetation, soils an...

Greenhouse gas emission reduction in the passenger transport sector is a main challenge for China’s climate mitigation agenda. Electrification and shared mobility provide encouraging options for carbon emissions reduction in road transport. Based on an integrated scenario-based assessment framework, a provincial-level projection is made for vehicle...

It is now well established that the demand side can contribute substantially to climate change mitigation thus increasing the solution space. The recent IPCC synthesis report for the first time explicitly reflected this class of solutions. Here, we provide an overview of an unique set of 22 review papers published in the focus issue of Environmenta...

A rapid phase-out of unabated coal use is essential to limit global warming to below 2 °C. This review presents a comprehensive assessment of coal transitions in mitigation scenarios consistent with the Paris Agreement, using data from more than 1500 publicly available scenarios generated by more than 30 integrated assessment models. Our ensemble a...

Independent Expert Report to the European Commission

The true climate mitigation challenge is revealed by considering sustainability impacts

Buildings are key in supporting human activities and well-being by providing shelter and other important services to their users. Buildings are, however, also responsible for major energy use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions during their life cycle. Improving the quality of services provided by buildings while reaching low energy demand (LED) lev...

Higher levels of economic activity are often accompanied by higher energy use and consumption of natural resources. As fossil fuels still account for 80% of the global energy mix, energy consumption remains closely linked to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and thus to climate change. Under the assumption of sufficiently elastic demand, this reality...

Global sustainability requires low-carbon urban transport systems, shaped by adequate infrastructure, deployment of low-carbon transport modes and shifts in travel behavior. To adequately implement alterations in infrastructure, it's essential to grasp the location-specific cause-and-effect mechanisms that the constructed environment has on travel....

In face of the threat of a climate catastrophe and the resulting urgent need for decarbonization together with the widespread emergence of the sharing economy, shared pooled mobility has been suggested as an alternative to private vehicle use. However, until now all of its real-life implementations have served a niche market, adjacent to taxi servi...

The ongoing global race for bigger and better artificial intelligence (AI) systems is expected to have a profound societal and environmental impact by altering job markets, disrupting business models, and enabling new governance and societal welfare structures that can affect global consensus for climate action pathways. However, the current AI sys...

India's GHG emissions pathway will be critical to keeping temperatures below 20C. It is still unclear how to reconcile the impact of rising household consumption with climate change goals. Here, we examine the role of household consumption by calculating the carbon emissions of 12 expenditure categories using 33 products and services reported in th...

Cities worldwide are increasingly committing to achieving net-zero carbon emissions in the coming decades. Most cities are not yet aware of the drastic changes in built environment required to reduce GHG emissions, and in many cases carbon neutrality targets will require atmospheric carbon removal outside or within city boundaries to offset remaini...

Built structures, i.e. the patterns of settlements and transport infrastructures, are known to influence per-capita energy demand and CO2 emissions at the urban level. At the national level, the role of built structures is seldom considered due to poor data availability. Instead, other potential determinants of energy demand and CO2 emissions, prim...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concludes that climate change has already caused substantial damages at the current 1.2°C of global warming and that warming of 1.5°C would elevate risks of a wide-range of climate tipping points. For example, wet-bulb temperatures are already exceeding safe levels, and the melting of the Greenland and...

City-level policies are increasingly recognized as key components of strategies to reduce transport greenhouse gas emissions. However, at a global scale, their total efficiencies, costs and practical feasibility remain unclear. Here we use a spatially explicit monocentric urban economic model, systematically calibrated on 120 cities worldwide, to a...

Steady growth in global greenhouse gas emissions from transport is driven by growing demand for car travel. Cities hold large potential to reduce energy demand and emissions from mobility through encouraging shorter travel distances and sustainable travel modes. In European cities however, personal cars still dominate travel, facilitating continued...

Building stock management is becoming a global societal and political issue, inter alia because of growing sustainability concerns. Comprehensive and openly accessible building stock data can enable impactful research exploring the most effective policy options. In Europe, efforts from citizen and governments generated numerous relevant datasets bu...

A mid-century net zero target creates a challenge for reducing the emissions of emissions-intensive, trade-exposed sectors with high cost mitigation options. These sectors include aluminium, cement, chemicals, iron and steel, lime, pulp and paper and petroleum refining. Available studies agree that decarbonization of these sectors is possible by mi...

The Russia–Ukraine conflict lays bare the dependence of the European Union (EU) on fossil fuel imports from Russia. Here, we use a global computable general equilibrium model, C³IAM/GEEPA, to estimate CO2 emission and gross domestic product (GDP) impact of embargoing fossil fuels from Russia. We find that embargoes induce more than 10% reduction of...

Urban areas account for between 71% and 76% of CO2 emissions from global final energy use and between 67–76% of global energy use. The highest emitting 100 urban areas (defined as contiguous population clusters) account for 18% of the global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. To date there is no comprehensive study of megacities (10 million+ populatio...

Chapter 5 (Demand, services and social aspects of mitigation), explores how mitigation interacts with meeting human needs and access to services. It explores, inter alia: sustainable production and consumption; patterns of development and indicators of wellbeing; the role of culture, social norms, practices and behaviour changes; the sharing econom...

Ambitious climate mitigation policies face social and political resistance. One reason is that existing policies insufficiently capture the diversity of relevant insights from the social sciences about potential policy outcomes. We argue that agent‐based models can serve as a powerful tool for integration of elements from different disciplines. Hav...

The Summary for Urban Policymakers (SUP) series distils the IPCC reports into targeted summaries to inform action at the city and regional scale. This third volume in the series, What the Latest Science on Climate Change Mitigation Means for Cities and Urban Areas offers a concise and accessible distillation of the IPCC Working Group III Report for...

City-level policies are increasingly recognized as key components of strategies to reduce transport greenhouse gas emissions. However, at a global scale, their total efficiencies, costs, and practical feasibility remain unclear. Here, we use a spatially-explicit urban economic model, systematically calibrated on 120 cities worldwide, to analyze the...

Municipalities are increasingly acknowledging the importance of urban form interventions that can reduce intra-city car travel in achieving more sustainable cities. Current academic knowledge for supporting such policies falls short in providing the spatial details required to plan specific interventions. Here, we develop an explainable machine lea...

Demand-side behavioural change interventions promote a reduction in car use, and shift to low carbon transport modes, thereby addressing economic, health and GHG emissions-related costs associated with car-dependent lifestyles. However, the relative effectiveness of such interventions in initiating transport behaviour change has not been evaluated...

Great claims have been made about the benefits of dematerialization in a digital service economy. However, digitalization has historically increased environmental impacts at local and planetary scales, affecting labor markets, resource use, governance, and power relationships. Here we study the past, present, and future of digitalization through th...

The COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s war on Ukraine have impacted the global economy, including the energy sector. The pandemic caused drastic fluctuations in energy demand, oil price shocks, disruptions in energy supply chains, and hampered energy investments, while the war left the world with energy price hikes and energy security challenges. The l...

This Cross-Working Group Box on Cities and Climate Change responds to the critical role of urbanisation as a megatrend impacting climate adaptation and mitigation. Issues associated with cities and urbanisation are covered in substantial depth within all three Working Groups (including WGI Box TS.14, WGII Chapter 6 ‘Cities, settlements and key infr...

Individual motorized vehicles in urban environments are inefficiently oversupplied both from the perspective of transport system efficiency and from the perspective of local and global environmental externalities. Shared mobility offers the promise of more efficient use of four-wheeler vehicles, while maintaining flexible routing. Here, we aim to u...

There is great interest in how the growth of artificial intelligence and machine learning may affect global GHG emissions. However, such emissions impacts remain uncertain, owing in part to the diverse mechanisms through which they occur, posing difficulties for measurement and forecasting. Here we introduce a systematic framework for describing th...

The war in Ukraine lays bar EU’s dependence of fossil fuel imports from Russia. Here, we use a global computable equilibrium model, C3IAM/GEEPA, to estimate CO2 emission and GDP impact of embargoing fossil fuels from Russia. We find that embargoes induce more than 10% reduction of CO2 emissions in the EU, and slight increases of emissions in Russia...

The GHG emission pathway of India will be crucial for keeping temperatures below 2°C or even 1.5°C. It is still unclear how to reconcile increasing consumption and energy demand, and questions of wellbeing for all, with climate change mitigation. Here, we investigate the role of Indian household consumption by calculating carbon footprints for 12 i...

Offener Brief

The Working Group III (WG III) contribution to the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) assesses literature on the scientific, technological, environmental, economic and social aspects of mitigation of climate change. The report reflects new findings in the relevant literature and builds on previous IPCC reports, including the WG III contribution t...

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity, and we, as machine learning (ML) experts, may wonder how we can help. Here we describe how ML can be a powerful tool in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and helping society adapt to a changing climate. From smart grids to disaster management, we identify high impact problems where e...

In your editorial „How researchers can help fight climate change in 2022 and beyond” you rightly emphasize the value of emerging energy supply and end-use technologies for achieving much needed though highly ambitious GHG emission reductions. However, meeting this goal at the necessary speed is not solely a technical problem. There is a long histor...

Spatial patterns of settlements and transport infrastructures are known to influence per-capita energy use and CO2 emissions at the urban level1–4. At the national level, other potential determinants of energy use and CO2 emissions, primarily GDP, received much attention5–7, whereas the role of settlements and infrastructure patterns was disregarde...

COVID-19 has magnified the deficiencies of how we manage our cities while giving us a unique chance to re-envision these, particularly in the global South. We argue that pandemic-resilient cities require rental-housing stocks and highly accessible urban environments, financed by land value capture.

Mitigation solutions are often evaluated in terms of costs and greenhouse gas reduction potentials, missing out on the consideration of direct effects on human well-being. Here, we systematically assess the mitigation potential of demand-side options categorized into avoid, shift and improve, and their human well-being links. We show that these opt...

A rapid coal phase-out is needed to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, but is hindered by serious challenges ranging from vested interests to the risks of social disruption. To understand how to organize a global coal phase-out, it is crucial to go beyond cost-effective climate mitigation scenarios and learn from the experience of previous coal...