Closing decent living gaps in energy and emissions scenarios: introducing DESIRE

Social and environmental agendas are intricately connected and shape the international policy discourse. To support these discussions, we present a framework for interpreting global scenario outcomes on energy demand and supply-side transitions through the lens of societal well-being and minimum resource requirements. We develop and apply a new model called Decent living standards and the Environment in Scenarios considering Inequality and Resource Efficiency (DESIRE) to fill a critical gap in modelling inequality-growth-efficiency interactions. Utilising bottom-up literature on energy inequality and minimum energy requirements, we analyse system-wide changes from integrated assessment models to assess whether levels of energy consumption in pathways can be consistent with providing decent living standards (DLS) for all, covering three sectors in 173 countries. We apply DESIRE to multiple new sustainable development pathways (SDPs). By 2040, the combination of ambitious inequality reductions, service provisioning efficiency, and higher energy services in the SDPs reduces the global residential and commercial energy deprivation—currently over 5 billion people—by at least 90%. Industry energy gaps are closed, but transport gaps remain. In the SDPs, more than half of the global population—including in low-income countries—achieve living standards more than twice as high as the DLS benchmark for the residential and commercial sector. Energy use beyond DLS across all sectors accounts for about two-thirds of total energy use globally. Efficiency improvements reduce global energy requirements 30%-46% by 2040 in the SDPs (across countries from 17-35 GJ cap⁻¹ in 2020 to 9-23 GJ cap⁻¹), while climate policies reduce CO₂ emissions related to energy for DLS to almost zero in 2050, keeping cumulative emissions for DLS for all until 2050 close to the size of the remaining carbon budget to 1.5 °C (at 50% probability). This work illustrates the possibility of pathways that deliver DLS for all while meeting the Paris Agreement.