Felix Creutzig

Technische Universität Berlin | TUB · Institut für Landschaftsarchitektur und Umweltplanung

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 CO 2 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+ populati...

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...

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...

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.

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...

Direct air capture (DAC) technologies remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from ambient air through chemical sorbents. Their scale-up is a backstop in many climate policy scenarios, but their environmental implications are debated. Here we present a comparative life-cycle assessment of the current demonstration plants of two main DAC technologies coupled wi...

Climate-change exposes an increasing share of the world population to potentially lethal heat, a threat accentuated by rapid urbanization. Here, we project occurrence of future deadly heat for urban agglomerations around the world until 2080 by using CMIP6 climate model projections of temperature and relative humidity, urbanization prospects and GD...

Die Bekämpfung der Klimakrise kann mit Maßnahmen gegen Armut und soziale Ungleichheit Hand in Hand gehen. Für Deutschland zeigen viele gängige Konzepte, dass Klimaschutz und sozialer Ausgleich für Privathaushalte verbunden werden können, sodass gerade finanzschwache Haushalte in Summe netto finanziell profitieren können. Ein Beispiel ist die Beprei...

People with high socioeconomic status disproportionally affect energy-driven greenhouse gas emissions directly through their consumption and indirectly through their financial and social resources. However, few climate change mitigation initiatives have targeted this population segment, and the potential of such initiatives remains insufficiently r...

Despite the importance of evaluating all mitigation options to inform policy decisions addressing climate change, a comprehensive analysis of household-scale interventions and their emissions reduction potential is missing. Here, we address this gap for interventions aimed at changing individual households’ use of existing equipment, such as moneta...

Although some countries are gradually returning to production and life, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect the world, further motivating recovery policies. Using a global computable general equilibrium (CGE) model, this study evaluates the environmental and economic impacts of COVID-19 on the world, both today and in the longer term. This st...

As buildings are central to the social and environmental sustainability of human settlements, high-quality geospatial data are necessary to support their management and planning. Authorities around the world are increasingly collecting and releasing such data openly, but these are mostly disconnected initiatives, making it challenging for users to...

Greenhouse gas (GHG) and pollutant emissions are closely related to the economic structure. Most of the existing studies focused on single type of emissions and cannot provide guidance for co-controlling multiple emissions. Here, we provide an improved elasticity method based on input-output model that relates both supply and demand side at high re...

Smart and shared mobility, from e-scooters to pool-riding services, reshape mobility in cities worldwide. While there is wide scope for new business opportunity in mobility, administrations remain unclear of how to manage and organize shared mobility and the big data underpinning shared mobility to serve the public good, in particular by reducing c...

New Energy Vehicles (NEVs), and especially electric cars, are rapidly changing the outlook of the car industry in China, the largest vehicle market in the world. However, an adjustment in subsidy schemes and breakout of COVID-19 appear to slow down the uptake of NEVs in the Chinese market. This raises the question of whether, other less costly, pol...

Long-lived capital-stocks (LLCS) such as infrastructure and buildings have significant and long-lasting implications for greenhouse gas emissions. They contribute to carbon lock-in and may hinder a rapid decarbonization of energy systems. Here we provide a systematic map of the literature on carbon lock-in induced by LLCS. Based on a structured sea...

Access to energy is a precondition for a decent standard of living. Some household decisions on energy consumption are however motivated to maintain or improve status, resulting in social zero-sum games, with environmentally harmful outcomes. Here, we review evidence relating status to energy consumption, elucidating consequential opportunities for...

Zusammenfassung Als fairer Beitrag Deutschlands zur Einhaltung der globalen 1,5-Grad-Grenze werden 16 Orientierungspunkte für eine klimaverträgliche Energieversorgung vorgestellt. Es wird davon ausgegangen, dass hierfür die deutschen energiebedingten CO2-Emissio-nen in etwa 15 Jahren weitgehend auf Null sinken müssen. Energieeinsparung hilft, den...

Cities produce more than 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Action by cities is therefore crucial for climate change mitigation as well as for safeguarding the health and wellbeing of their populations under climate change. Many city governments have made ambitious commitments to climate change mitigation and adaptation and implemented a range...

Home Browse Climate action for health and wellbeing in cities: a protocol for... ALL METRICS 99 VIEWS 11 DOWNLOADS Get PDF Get XML Cite Export Track Email Share ▬ STUDY PROTOCOL Climate action for health and wellbeing in cities: a protocol for the systematic development of a database of peer-reviewed studies using machine learning methods [version...

As current action remains insufficient to meet the goals of the Paris agreement let alone to stabilize the climate, there is increasing hope that solutions related to demand, services and social aspects of climate change mitigation can close the gap. However, given these topics are not investigated by a single epistemic community, the literature ba...

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to strongly affect global energy systems. Global power sector CO2 emissions have shown a substantial decline, thanks to (a) the COVID-19-induced economic downturn and resulting reduction of electricity demand and (b) a decrease of carbon intensity of power generation as coal generation is decreased most strongly. The...

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an unprecedented decline in global air transport and associated reduction in CO2 emissions. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) reacted by weakening its own CO2-offsetting rules. Here we investigate whether the pandemic can be an opportunity to bring the sector on a reliable low-carbon trajectory, w...

The last decade witnessed a rapid rise in shared mobility in China. However, there is lack of understanding how the shared mobility market developed, how shared mobility reshapes daily travel patterns, and what shared mobility contributes, if at all, to environmental goals, and in particular climate change mitigation. Here, we systematically review...

The majority of scenarios that meet the goals of the Paris agreements exceed sustainability and precautionary thresholds in land, biodiversity and BECCS potentials. Risks may be best avoided by demand‐side driven rapid decarbonization and less land‐intensive carbon dioxide removal technologies.

GERMAN SUMMARY (English Summary further below): Die Zeit drängt. Ohne schnell wirksame Gegenmaßnahmen werden Erderhitzung und Biodiversitätsverlust Ausmaße annehmen, welche die Lebensweise von Menschen nicht abschätzbaren Risiken aussetzen. Obwohl die Herausforderungen weiten Teilen der Bevölkerung bewusst sind, werden dringend nötige Entscheidung...