From efficiency to sufficiency

From FORESIGHT Climate & Energy, Watt Matters is a podcast all about the energy transition and the shift to a decarbonised economy

For the best possible audio experience, listen to Watt Matters in the FORESIGHT app. This requires a subscription to FORESIGHT Climate & Energy. If you would like to know if your company/organisation is subscribed to FORESIGHT Climate & Energy, or if you would like a reminder of your login details, send an email to info@foresightdk.com.

Lawmakers around the globe have spoken extensively about energy efficiency. However, there is an increasing interest in policy and academic circles around sufficiency: these are often labelled as demand-side measures or changes to individual habits that reduce our use of energy and natural resources.

In this episode, we look into how governments and EU policy instruments are addressing sufficiency measures and to which extent they are successful or not. While Europe has made progress in unrolling technical energy efficiency measures, there is still a clear lack of sufficiency measures needed to tackle the climate crisis.

Sufficiency efforts have often faced resistance as individual behavioural change is sometimes seen as a loss of quality of life, particularly for the most vulnerable consumers. This requires a fundamental change in the narrative, says this week’s guest Yamina Saheb. Saheb is a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) latest report, senior Energy Policy Analyst at OpenExp and lecturer at Sciences Po in Paris.