Emissions from residential and commercial buildings make up around 10% of total energy sector emissions for Colombia, mainly due to the growth in gas consumption.
Colombia launched a roadmap to decarbonise the buildings sector with specific targets and actions, aiming for all new buildings to be net zero by 2030 and for all buildings to be net zero by 2050.25
Some measures include improving energy efficiency standards for cooling and heating by implementing resolution N°0549 relating to sustainable construction.26
The range of 1.5 °C compatible pathways see an increase in electrification and a decrease in biomass consumption, with the electrification rate going up from 45% in 2019 to 90-95% by 2050.
Colombia will need to focus on improving building energy efficiency, and replacing heating and cooling appliances with efficient alternatives, among other measures, given that space heating and cooling are the main drivers of emissions in the sector.
13 Groot, K. de, Vega, C. B.- & Juarez-Lucas, A. Turning the Tide: Improving Water Security for Recovery and Sustainable Growth in Colombia. World Bank 36 (2020).
31 While global cost-effective pathways assessed by the IPCC Special Report 1.5°C provide useful guidance for an upper-limit of emissions trajectories for developed countries, they underestimate the feasible space for such countries to reach net zero earlier. The current generation of models tend to depend strongly on land-use sinks outside of currently developed countries and include fossil fuel use well beyond the time at which these could be phased out, compared to what is understood from bottom-up approaches. The scientific teams which provide these global pathways constantly improve the technologies represented in their models – and novel CDR technologies are now being included in new studies focused on deep mitigation scenarios meeting the Paris Agreement. A wide assessment database of these new scenarios is not yet available; thus, we rely on available scenarios which focus particularly on BECCS as a net-negative emission technology. Accordingly, we do not yet consider land-sector emissions (LULUCF) and other CDR approaches.
32 In some of the analysed pathways, the energy sector assumes already a certain amount of carbon dioxide removal technologies, in this case bioenergy carbon capture and storage (BECCS).