State-of-the-art sustainable approaches for deeper decarbonization in Europe – An endowment to climate neutral vision

Europe anchored aspiring targets in achieving climate neutrality and this motivates the research communities to analyze, investigate and frame strategies to achieve the goals in the stipulated timeframe. This study reviews the effective decarbonization strategies in the context of Europe's climate neutral vision. Initially, the study analyzes the reasons for ever-increasing emissions and investigates the perception of decarbonization in line with various influencing factors such as population size, economic growth, energy intensity, emission intensity, innovation, affordability and time. Subsequently, an in-depth qualitative analysis is performed to force out the challenges that Europe faces in decarbonizing the heating sector from the aspects, such as using clean energy resources, effective heat energy conversion and management approaches. Sustainable approaches and practices are proposed to mitigate carbonization and to promote carbon sink in line with the major problems associated with various sectors such as building, energy, industry and transportation sector. Furthermore, the roles of digitalization in decarbonization are explored and the inherent challenges are also discussed. This study also reviews various decarbonization policies that can direct the governments' action to effectively make a transition towards a climate-neutral society. The key findings highlight that solar energy utilization in small-scale is relatively not preferable for heat energy conversion in Europe due to climatic conditions, while district heating network with bio- and geothermal energy resource highly favors clean heat transformation scenario. In addition, 3D printing has a prodigious role to reduce building lifecycle emissions and hybrid policies as well as reward-based policies yields better outcomes. Promoting hydrogen utilization and carbon capture storage and utilization technologies can pivot climate neutrality in the sectors that are difficult to decarbonize. On the other hand, it can be observed that more focus is provided to reduce emissions and significantly less attention is focused on carbon sink.