The Sufficiency Gap: Why Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway’s Cement Decarbonization Roadmaps Underachieve by Ignoring Demand- Side Measures

Cement is essential for modern infrastructure but produces 5-8% of global CO₂, with process emissions that fuel subsitution alone cannot reduce. Meeting the Paris Agreement's call for "highest possible mitigation ambition" requires exploring every decarbonization pathway, including reducing demand. However, cement sector roadmaps, while acknowledging deep decarbonization needs, overwhelmingly treat demand as fixed and residual emissions as technically inevitable. To assess how actors define and justify residual emissions, we analyze decarbonization roadmaps of the cement sector (strategic documents from government, industry, and civil society outlining sectoral pathways) for Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway—countries selected for their high floorspace per capita, a key indicator of significant potential for demand-side sufficiency strategies. Using qualitative document analysis, we code 30 decarbonization
levers identified iteratively from roadmaps and literature, categorized via a cement-specific Mitigation Hierarchy (Avoid, Reduce, Reuse, Replace, Minimize, Capture and Store, Offset). Our findings expose a persistent sufficiency gap: roadmaps prioritize incremental technical solutions (e.g., novel binders, clinker substitution) and speculative carbon storage (e.g., CCS), while neglecting transformative measures like material reuse, alternative construction methods, or demand-side strategies (e.g., spatial efficiency policies, cooperative housing). By excluding demand mitigation (e.g., treating per capita cement demand as exogenous at 200–400 kg/year), roadmaps artificially inflate residual emissions. The Dutch Betonakkord marginally addresses circularity, and older German pathways hint at efficient space use, but none integrate sufficiency levers systematically. The consequences are profound: by framing high material demand as immutable, roadmaps lock in carbon-intensive development pathways and defer responsibility to unproven technologies. This contradicts the Paris Agreement’s equity and ambition principles, which demand interdisciplinary integration of mitigation strategies. Residual emissions are not inevitable but politically constructed. Truly Paris-aligned pathways must challenge demand growth through collaboration across engineering, industrial ecology, social sciences and urban history. Without this shift, our reliance on speculative technical measures risks not achieving climate targets.