## 5 Conclusions  
Both Denmark and Sweden have adopted ambitious urban transition agendas, as in Copenhagen and Malmo. Upgrading the building stock is seen as a necessity for a transition to lower CO\({}_{2}\) emissions,higher energy standards and better well-being in the built environment. Financing is not specified in the climate plans, and investments are assumed to be absorbed within general government budgets and by the market _i.e._, carried as private costs. For this reason, financial sustainability becomes a pivotal issue. What matters at the specific project level for financing decisions are calculations of total economy of the intervention, including running costs, rent and expected asset appreciation of the concerned property.  
Reducing energy consumption in the built environment is not the same as reducing CO\({}_{2}\) emissions or for that matter improving urban quality, public health and quality of life. These are three different goals and cannot be assumed to be satisfactorily addressed by measures designed to achieve improvements in only one of the three. As the correlation is low between the goals, it is argued that measures or actions claimed to address them all call for a reevaluation according to the expected effect on each separate goal. In the case of deep renovations in Sweden, significant increases in rent for areas populated by socio-economically challenged tenants may follow the renovations, hence generating adverse distributional effects not transparently accounted for in current climate plans.  
It is evident that for energy efficiency measures, the target set needs to be informed by the state of the building and the current energy consumption. The increasing marginal costs of energy reductions are highly significant and cannot be overlooked or considered irrelevant for target setting. On average, high ambitions for energy reductions is likely to be more appropriate for housing with relatively high energy consumption, as the marginal cost of reducing the energy consumption will be significantly lower than for housing with average or low energy consumption. Including third parties as with ESCO/EPC contracting may help identifying appropriate ambition levels.  
In Sweden, reducing energy consumption in the built environment is not an effective way to lower CO\({}_{2}\) emissions as the sector represents only about 10% of national emissions. To reach the target of CO\({}_{2}\) emissions cost-effectively, measures aimed at lowering emissions from larger contributors should first be exhausted before more marginal contributions are to be considered.  
In conclusion, evidence from both Denmark and Sweden suggests that the costs of higher energy standards dwarf the energy savings potential in apartment blocks, and different studies show that extensive energy refurbishing is generally not economically feasible but may be made more so if incorporated into regular maintenance cycles or conducted within a broader context which may justify the investment. Moreover, costs of extensive renovation of apartment blocks are disproportionate to the expected limited reduction in CO\({}_{2}\) emission resulting from the intervention in both Sweden and Denmark. Accumulated experience with energy refurbishing projects points towards a need to revisit the strategies of climate and energy plans currently being implemented in the Oresund region in this regard.  
The paper was prepared in connection with and with partial funding from the project \"Urban Transition Oresund\", under the EU programme Interreg IV A', [[http://www.urban-transition.org/](http://www.urban-transition.org/)]([http://www.urban-transition.org/](http://www.urban-transition.org/)).  
Author Contributions Author one and author two equally contributed to the ideas and joint sections of the paper, while the case material from Denmark and Sweden were prepared by author one and two respectively.