Sustainable development embraces a broad spectrum of social, economic and ecological aspects. Thus, a sustainable transformation process of energy systems is inevitably multidimensional and needs to go beyond climate impact and cost considerations. An approach for an integrated and interdisciplinary sustainability assessment of energy system transformation pathways is presented here. It first integrates energy system modeling with a multidimensional impact assessment that focuses on life cycle-based environmental and macroeconomic impacts. Then, stakeholders’ preferences with respect to defined sustainability indicators are inquired, which are finally integrated into a comparative scenario evaluation through a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA), all in one consistent assessment framework. As an illustrative example, this holistic approach is applied to the sustainability assessment of ten different transformation strategies for Germany. Applying multi-criteria decision analysis reveals that both ambitious (80%) and highly ambitious (95%) carbon reduction scenarios can achieve top sustainability ranks, depending on the underlying energy transformation pathways and respective scores in other sustainability dimensions. Furthermore, this research highlights an increasingly dominant contribution of energy systems’ upstream chains on total environmental impacts, reveals rather small differences in macroeconomic effects between different scenarios and identifies the transition among societal segments and climate impact minimization as the most important stakeholder preferences.
The EU Commission has introduced the instrument of National Energy and Climate Plans (NECP) to better achieve energy and climate policy targets. In Germany, a comprehensive study was commissioned for this purpose. Its methods and main results are presented here. It starts with a set of energy system models that maps the necessary changes in the energy system, together with corresponding measures bottom-up. The results then enter the PANTA RHEI macroeconometric top-down model as scenario inputs to determine the socioeconomic effects. According to the bottom-up models, achieving the target of 55% GHG reduction by 2030 will not be easy. The macroeconomic effects are mostly positive. Driven by additional investment, GDP and the number of jobs will be higher than in the baseline. The construction and service sectors can benefit from energy and climate policy measures. The share of final consumer expenditures on energy in GDP declines by 2030 compared to today. However, the direction and magnitude of the effects are not undisputed in the literature. The results show that ambitious climate policies are possible in Germany, which can also improve the achievement of economic and social goals.
Previous research has focused on comparing health behaviour between parents and non-parents at younger ages, while little is known about the impact of being a parent on health behaviours in later life. We studied whether parenthood is associated with later physical activity (PA), dietary pattern, smoking status and alcohol consumption in German adults of middle and old age. We used data from the baseline examination of the population-based CARLA-study in Halle (Saale), comprising 1779 adults aged 45–83. Linear and logistic regression analyses assessed the relationship between parenthood and health behaviours while controlling for age, partner status, education, income, occupational position, socioeconomic status in childhood, and number of chronic diseases. Of the participants, 89.1% had biological children. Being a father was associated with higher PA in sports (sport index ß = 0.29, 95% confidence interval [0.14; 0.44]), but not with PA in leisure time (excluding sports), dietary pattern, consumption of alcohol and smoking status. No associations were found between being a mother with all outcome variables. Provided that PA of fathers is typically reduced when the children are young, the development towards higher PA at later age needs to be studied in more detail.
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