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Visions, Scenarios and Pathways for Rapid Decarbonisation of Australian Cities by 2040

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Abstract

Action on climate change will require significant transformation of the urban infrastructure and living patterns of cities. This transformation will arise from the processes of decarbonising urban/city energy systems as well as disentangling carbon emissions from all the services of provision that enable urban life. Cities are complex technical-physical-ecological-social-cultural systems and transformation presents what is arguably the archetypical ‘wicked’problem where an effort to change one system of provision may generate unexpected (and possibly undesirable) changes in another. This chapter describes a four-year interdisciplinary research and engagement project to elaborate transformative decarbonisation scenarios for four Australian capital cities. The project used visualisation, scenario generation and pathways analysis, with the researchers supported by a panel of almost 250 professionals from business, government and civil society.

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Correspondence to Chris Ryan .

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Ryan, C. et al. (2019). Visions, Scenarios and Pathways for Rapid Decarbonisation of Australian Cities by 2040. In: Newton, P., Prasad, D., Sproul, A., White, S. (eds) Decarbonising the Built Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7940-6_27

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