Decoupling relationship between income and housing energy consumption in Morocco

The housing sector is one of Morocco’s economic sectors, coming in second to the transportation sector in terms of CO2 emissions and energy consumption. In order to help Morocco meet its goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it is necessary to identify doable strategies to conserve energy and cut CO2 emissions from this sector. Using the Tapio and logarithmic-mean Divisia index methods (LMDI), this study explores the decoupling connection between economic production and household energy consumption for the instance of Morocco for the years 1990–2017. According to the driving mechanism, the home energy consumption is divided into the impacts of domestic energy intensity effect, housing structure effect, economic output, and population scale effect. Empirical findings showed that, only five decoupling states—weak decoupling, strong decoupling, expansive decoupling, strong negative decoupling, and expansive negative decoupling—appeared over the study’s time frame. The primary factor driving the national decoupling was housing energy intensity, whereas the primary factor impeding the decoupling was economic activity. The demographic change impact and the housing structure decoupling effect, however, only contributed minimally to the prevention of decoupling.