The growing demand of consumer goods increases the pressure on material consumption while putting at risk the efforts to decarbonize and limit global warming to 1.5ºC. Appliances are among the fastest growing categories of energy demand, driven by increase in revenues and rising ownership of devices. They already account for 15% of global final electricity demand, or one-third of the energy consumed in buildings if lighting and cooking is included. If demand keeps increasing at the same pace, overrunning the improvements in energy efficiency, one out of six units of final energy demand in 2050 will go to consumer goods (i.e. appliances and electric plug-loads) , even in a low energy demand scenario. This would put at risk the efforts to reduce the energy consumption in buildings, which already account for 60% of global electricity demand, corresponding to 28% of global energy-related CO2 emissions in 2019. New technological and social innovations open opportunities to conciliate the higher demands for consumer goods with the decarbonization targets. Two trends are particularly promising to reduce the energy demand from appliances, without lowering the provision of energy services (e.g. communication, entertainment, cool and heating): digital convergence and sharing economies. Digital convergence refers to the tendency of stand-alone objects to converge onto new devices, creating hybrid "multifunctional" objects. The typical example is the smartphone that converged previously unrelated technologies such as the telephone, television and computer through an increasing interplay of shared parts consisting of digital electronics and software including applications or “Apps”. Sharing economy denotes the case in which an otherwise underutilized good or service, such as cars or devices, is used by multiple people, as opposed to its ownership for individual consumption. Moving from owning to sharing presents several benefits such as more intensive use of the good or service, waste minimizing (circular economy) and reduction in the material needs (dematerialization). Sharing economy and digital convergence can therefore contribute to significantly lower the demand of consumer goods. They open promising avenues to lower both the energy demand and the material consumption from appliances. The environmental benefits could be of several orders of magnitude by service provided, largely compensating any possible rebound in consumption. More importantly, digital convergence and sharing could enable the widespread access to the services provided by modern consumer goods (entertainment, communication, lighting, etc.), particularly to the population in developing countries where their access is more limited today. The purpose of this paper is to estimate the potential of digital convergence and sharing economy to reduce the energy demand from consumer goods and to dematerialization in 2050 for meeting the 1.5ºC target and the sustainable development goals. We develop a scenario that satisfies the demands for consumer goods in 2050 while ensuring decent living standards for all. This scenario reduces the energy demand by roughly a third and the material consumption by a fifth relatively to 2020. The results contribute to identify strategies that drastically lower the energy and material requirements from consumer goods. The analyses identify the categories of appliances with the highest potential for energy and material reductions. The regional disaggregation reveals the areas that will contribute the most for the growing demand of consumer goods, and thus should receive more attention. Finally, and more importantly, the results show that digital convergence and sharing can counteract the increase in energy demand of consumer goods from rising revenues and the provision of decent living standards, with lessons for other sectors.

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technological change; sustainability transitions; decent living standards,consumer goods,digital convergence,sharing