With growing urbanization, our cities are playing an increasingly important role in accelerating energy efficiency improvements and mitigating climate change (REN21 2016). Cities are one of the biggest consumers of energy in the world, representing almost two-thirds of global primary energy demand and accounting for 70 per cent of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the energy sector (IEA2016). Therefore, with urbanization forecast to continue cities will be a critical driver in the sustainable energy transition. Typically city governments have direct decision powers to implement policy actions, which have the potential for immediate and high-impact results (C402016). According to the Carbon Disclosure Project, 553 cities globally representing 621 million people have reported on the climate actions they are taking in 2016, demon-strating a 70 per cent growth in climate actions and reporting efforts since 2015 (Holder 2016).Population growth and urbanization are together expanding global building stocks that are increasing the urgency to reduce GHG emissions from the buildings sector by at least a quarter by 2030, in order to have a chance of limiting average global temperature increase to less than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels (IEA 2016).
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