The building sector is a very minimal contributor of emissions in Zimbabwe (around 1% over total GHG emissions in 2017, around 0.4 MtCO₂e), largely due to the interplay of informal, existing housing stock, slow urbanisation and the unmet demands for housing in cities.5 For this sector to play a positive role in keeping the country’s emissions low, electricity – produced by renewable resources – would have to play an ever-larger role in the sector even as the government seeks to increase housing supply.
Our analyses indicate that the share of electricity would need to increase from a low of 4% of the energy mix in this sector in 2019 to between 78-90% in 2050.
In 2020, the government reported that it had banned incandescent lights, removed duties on solar equipment, introduced prepaid meters for demand side electricity management and regulations to govern the installation of solar geysers.5
15 Global cost-effective pathways assessed by the IPCC Special Report 1.5°C tend to include fossil fuel use well beyond the time at which these could be phased out, compared to what is understood from bottom-up approaches, and often rely on rather conservative assumptions in the development of renewable energy technologies. This tends to result in greater reliance on technological CDR than if a faster transition to renewables were achieved. The scenarios available at the time of this analysis focus particularly on BECCS as a net-negative emission technology, and our downscaling methods do not yet take national BECCS potentials into account.