Embracing sufficiency to accelerate the energy transition

Abstract

In a rapidly warming world, the transition to renewable energy faces challenges on many fronts. Sufficiency measures, which focus on reducing overall energy demand, hold great potential to accelerate the energy transition and create truly sustainable societies, yet remain underexplored in policy circles. In our perspective, we emphasize sufficiency as a cornerstone for a successful energy transition and broader societal sustainability. We identify key barriers to sufficiency and sketch how policymakers, businesses, researchers, the media and arts, and civil society can help to overcome them. We note that a full transition to sufficiency, beyond individual interventions or novel practices, requires systemic changes that address underlying structural barriers, and distil four broad lessons from the field of transition studies that can help achieve these systemic changes. We call on relevant stakeholders to embrace sufficiency in order to accelerate the energy transition.