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Summary:The acceleration of low-carbon transitions across the sociotechnical systems of electricity, heat, buildings, manufacturing, and transport requires new conceptual approaches, analytical foci, and policy recommendations.Rapid and deep reductions in greenhouse gas emission are needed to avoid dangerous climate change. To provide a reasonable (66%) chance of limiting global temperature increases to below 2 o C, global energy-related carbon emissions must peak by 2020 and fall by more than 70% in the next 35 years.1 This implies a tripling of the annual rate of energy efficiency improvement, retrofitting the entire building stock, generating 95% of electricity from low-carbon sources by 2050 and shifting almost entirely towards electric cars.Deep decarbonization will necessitate low-carbon transitions across electricity, transport, heat, industrial, forestry and agricultural systems. But despite recent rapid growth in renewable electricity generation, the rate of progress towards this wider goal remains slow. Moreover, many energy and climate researchers remain wedded to disciplinary approaches that focus on a single piece of the lowcarbon transition puzzle. 2 A case in point is a recent Policy Forum 3 proposing a 'carbon law' that will guarantee that zero-emissions are reached. This model-based prescription focuses on policy, but not politics, culture, business, and social factors, thus avoiding many crucial real-world drivers of accelerated transitions.This Policy Forum presents a 'sociotechnical' framework that addresses the multidimensionality of the deep decarbonization challenge and shows how co-evolutionary interactions between technologies and multiple societal groups can accelerate low-carbon transitions. We organize this approach around four lessons, emphasizing factors that receive less attention in techno-economic and modeling approaches.

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