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Developing transformative pathways for industry's compliance with international climate targets requires model-based insights into how supply- and demand-side measures affect industry, material cycles, global supply chains, socioeconomic activities, and service provisioning that support societal well-being. We review the recent literature modeling the industrial system in low energy and material demand futures, which mitigates environmental impacts without relying on risky future negative emissions and technological fixes. We identify 77 innovative studies drawing on nine distinct industry modeling traditions. We critically assess system definitions and scopes, biophysical and thermodynamic consistency, granularity and heterogeneity, and operationalization of demand and service provisioning. We find that combined supply- and demand-side measures could reduce current economy-wide material use by 56%, energy use by 40% to 60%, and greenhouse gas emissions by 70% to net zero. We call for strengthened interdisciplinary collaborations between industry modeling traditions and demand-side research to produce more insightful scenarios, and we discuss challenges and recommendations for this emerging field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change and energy service demand exert influence on each other through temperature change and greenhouse gas emissions. We have consistently evaluated global residential thermal demand and energy consumption up to the year 2050 under different climate change scenarios. We first constructed energy service demand intensity (energy service demand per household) functions for each of three services (space heating, space cooling, and water heating). The space heating and cooling demand in 2050 in the world as a whole become 2.1-2.3 and 3.8-4.5 times higher than the figures for 2010, whose ranges are originated from different global warming scenarios. Cost-effective residential energy consumption to satisfy service demand until 2050 was analyzed keeping consistency among different socio-economic conditions, ambient temperature, and carbon dioxide (CO) emission pathways using a global energy assessment model. Building shell improvement and fuel fuel-type transition reduce global final energy consumption for residential thermal heating by 30% in 2050 for a 2 °C target scenario. This study demonstrates that climate change affects residential space heating and cooling demand by regions, and their desirable strategies for cost-effective energy consumption depend on the global perspectives on CO emission reduction. Building shell improvement and energy efficiency improvement and fuel fuel-type transition of end-use technologies are considered to be robust measures for residential thermal demand under uncertain future CO emission pathways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Social, technological, economic and environmental issues should be considered comprehensively for the evaluation of global-warming mitigation options. Existing integrated assessment models include assessment of quantitative factors; however, these models do not explicitly consider interactions among qualitative factors in the background – for example, introductions of nuclear power stations interact with social acceptability. In this paper, we applied a technological forecasting method – the cross-impact method – which explicitly deals with the relationships among relevant factors, and we then developed narrative scenarios having consistency with qualitative social contexts. An example of developed scenarios in 2050, assuming the global population and the gross domestic product are the same as those of the A1 scenario of the IPCC Special Report on Emissions Scenarios, tells us that: (1) the Internet will be extensively used in all regions; (2) the global unified market will appear; (3) regional cultures will tend to converge; (4) long-term investments (of more than 30 years) will become difficult and therefore nuclear-power stations will not increase so remarkably; (5) the self-sufficient supply and diversification of primary energy sources will not progress so rapidly; and (6) due to the widespread use of the Internet, people will be more educated in global environmental issues and environmental costs will be more socially acceptable. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

R&D (research and development) processes of CO2 capture technologies having different levels of energy efficiency are evaluated through GERT (Graphical Evaluation and Review Technique) analyses. Five types of the technologies are targeted for evaluation: chemical absorption, physical adsorption, membrane separation, O2/CO2 recirculation boiler, and integrated hydrogen separation gas turbine technologies. These technologies are decomposed into elemental technologies, and network charts are constructed which express R&D processes of the target technologies for the GERT analyses. Data on the elemental technology R&Ds are collected through a questionnaire to Japanese experts in 2001, and are used for the evaluation. The obtained results include that (1) the average expected time periods required for the completion of the target technology R&Ds are in the range of 16 and 19 years, except for a shorter R&D time of 13.8 years for the chemical absorption CO2 capture technology having the conventional energy efficiency, (2) though the R&D success probabilities are relatively high for the chemical absorption type CO2 capture technologies, they become lower as the energy efficiency becomes higher, which implies that the R&Ds of the capture technologies other than the chemical absorption type are also recommended for the successful completion of the capture technology which has the highest energy efficiency among the target technologies, and (3) additional R&D investments on large scale equipment such as tower, blower and pumping technologies are cost-effective for accelerating the target technology R&Ds. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]