Korevaar–Schoen’s energy on strongly rectifiable spaces

We extend Korevaar–Schoen’s theory of metric valued Sobolev maps to cover the case of the source space being an RCD space. In this situation it appears that no version of the ‘subpartition lemma’ holds: to obtain both existence of the limit of the approximated energies and the lower semicontinuity of the limit energy we shall rely on:the fact that such spaces are ‘strongly rectifiable’ a notion which is first-order in nature (as opposed to measure-contraction-like properties, which are of second order). This fact is particularly useful in combination with Kirchheim’s metric differentiability theorem, as it allows to obtain an approximate metric differentiability result which in turn quickly provides a representation for the energy density,the differential calculus developed by the first author which allows, thanks to a representation formula for the energy that we prove here, to obtain the desired lower semicontinuity from the closure of the abstract differential. When the target space is CAT(0) we can also identify the energy density as the Hilbert-Schmidt norm of the differential, in line with the smooth situation.