Sustainable development pathways achieving Human well-being while safeguarding the climate And Planet Earth

The SHAPE project is a collaborative project involving seven institute in Europe and is funded through the AXIS-JPI mechanisms in participation of the Research Council of Norway. The SHAPE project aims to create scientific visions of how humanity can achieve a good quality of life for everyone while safeguarding our planet. The project is inspired by the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The UN established these goals to unite actors around the world to create an environmentally and socially sustainable society. Unfortunately, we are likely to miss many of the goals. SHAPE wants to help change this. A critical aspect is tension between development on the one hand and environmental protection on the other. How can we ensure a fair development for all, while halting ecosystem destruction? The project provides insight into possible ways to realize the goals, trade-off among the goals, and actions necessary now to realize such scenarios. By proposing three narratives for alternative sustainable development pathways, the project considers the necessary changes in the economy and public policy. The production of materials causes 23% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and reduced material use presents opportunities to reduce both emissions and other environmental impacts. Integrated assessment models used to develop sustainability scenarios do not model the relation between growth in building stock and the materials of buildings, or economic growth and the metals needed to produce machinery, equipment, or vessels. NTNU contributes to the fulfillment of project objectives in several ways. 1. The main contribution consists of a further development of an ODYM-RECC model that models the material cycle and demand for resources as a result of identified economic activity, such as residential construction or driving. The focus of the work of the PhD candidate is to establish a new way of defining archetypes of buildings and carrying out calculations of building material and energy use of the buildings in different countries. The PhD candidate has carried out modelling of buildings in the six member countries of the Arab Gulf Co-operation Council. In addition, work is underway in various other countries in North Africa and the Middle East, and in Nigeria. These will lead to scenario analyses of the development of material use and energy use for the construction and operation of buildings, as a function of building styles, energy standards, and demand preferences. 2. The team has developed the tool BuildME, which serves the task of modeling materials and energy use for buildings depending on weather, as well as assessing various measures in these buildings through modeling of different design designs of these. 3. The team also works on a better understanding of climate change mitigation, climate policy, and societal changes. Contribution to the development of transition narratives and assessment of current policy, technology, and social development in relation to these. Contribute to the public debate on current issues and policy development by considering proposed solutions in relation to scientific investigations and theories.

The SHAPE project has published a first set of Sustainable Development Pathways, developed under the leadership of project coordinator PIK. The full set of scenarios, based on the work of several modelling teams, will be the focus of a Journal special issue that is planned. There is currently discussion both with Environmental Research Letters and Global Environmental Change. The SI will include a description of the scenario development process with stakeholders (co-design), the modelling of specific categories identified as important, such as buildings, and the modelling results of different modelling teams, plus a comparative analysis. The results have been presented at the final conference. There was positive feedback from the stakeholders. The NTNU team has done a range of analyses addressing sustainable production and consumption and equity issues relarted to sustainable development using the EXIOBASE model and published these. There has been a significant public interest in the work addressing age-related differences in consumption patterns and their impact. NTNU has also contributed to the improved modelling of the resource consumption of providing shelter, modelling differnt resource efficiency strategies in buildings through the ODYM-RECC model. The work demonstrates the complementarity and potential of material efficiency strategies to reduce GHG emissions and material footprints. This work has been communicated to relevant stakeholders, has informed policy at the EU level, and is now being exploited in new projects. NTNU has also developed a new approach to model material footprints for sustainable development scenarios using the EXIOfutures model. This work is not entirely finished, but the demonstration of the approach will occur in another new project.

The UN 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) present a vision for the wellbeing of all people in prosperity, peace and partnership while preserving the integrity of our planet. However the world is not on track for meeting many of the SDGs. An integrated approach is needed to benefit from possible synergies between climate targets and other SDGs – while mitigating possible trade-offs. SHAPE will develop and analyse Sustainable Development Pathways (SDPs) that achieve the SDGs in 2030 and maintain sustainable development to reach the Paris climate goals until 2100. SHAPE brings together lead members of the Integrated Assessment Modeling Consortium (PIK, IIASA, UU) with experts in sustainability science and governance (DIE, SRC, IASS) and industrial ecology (NTNU). SHAPE will bring important progress beyond the state of the art by bridging model-based system analysis, industrial ecology modelling, social sciences, and participatory dialogue methods, thus providing a full interdisciplinary approach encompassing both natural and social sciences. The Norwegian component of the project sees NTNU leading scenario work on modelling sustainable consumption and production, and contributing strongly to work on inequality and scenario integration. The sustainable consumption and production work will focus on improving the empirical foundations for the quantification of demand-side drivers, with specific coverage of the roles of households, government and infrastructure in terms of overall resource use. At the same time, better representation of physical demands in the economy - with a focus on resource use through supply chains will be enacted. The project is expected to provide critical insights into trade-offs and synergies in furthering sustainable development.