Job creation in a low carbon transition to renewables and energy efficiency: a review of international evidence
AbstractIn this paper, we present findings from a systematic review on job creation, quality, and skills, focusing on decarbonisation in the energy sector. We compare a range of gross job employment factors which indicate that overall, investment in renewable energy and energy efficiency can deliver more jobs than gas or coal power generation. In addition, we review a subset of recent studies which estimate the net employment effects of decarbonisation in the energy sector at a national scale, across various international contexts. These national studies largely agree that the most likely outcome over the next few decades ...
Source: Sustainability Science - January 11, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: research
Monitoring environmental sustainability in Japan: an ESGAP assessment
AbstractThis paper assesses the environmental sustainability of Japan by applying the environmental sustainability gap (ESGAP) framework, which builds on the concepts of strong sustainability, critical natural capital, environmental functions, and science-based reference values. The assessment is carried out using two indices of environmental sustainability (Strong Environmental Sustainability Index (SESI) and Strong Environmental Sustainability Progress Index (SESPI)) that provide a snapshot and a trend perspective on environmental sustainability performance and on progress toward it. The results reveal that Japan has not...
Source: Sustainability Science - January 10, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: research
Directing personal sustainability science toward subjective experience: conceptual, methodological, and normative cornerstones for a first-person inquiry into inner worlds
AbstractDespite the rapid expansion of sustainability science in recent decades, sustainability crises have continued to grow. Sustainability researchers argue that this is partly the result of neglecting people ’s inner worlds and call for a stronger consideration of inner states and processes in sustainability scholarship. We argue that the advancement ofpersonal sustainability science, i.e., the systematic inquiry of inner worlds in relation to sustainability, is currently impeded by at least two unresolved issues. First, attitudes, emotions, values, and the like have frequently been the object of sustainability-relat...
Source: Sustainability Science - January 5, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: research
Can security be sustainable? Three perspectives on security and social sustainability: paradox, co-production, and deconstruction
AbstractSecurity and sustainability are prioritized goals in the “Western liberal” world. Maintaining democratic resources while simultaneously strengthening society’s ability to deal with security issues firmly resonates with ideals associated with social sustainability. However, merging normative theories like security and social sustainability produces c onceptual difficulties that are hard to resolve. Based on key literature in this field and policy documents from the UN, this article uses conceptual analysis to investigate what boundaries and openings three distinct perspectives of the connection between social ...
Source: Sustainability Science - January 3, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: research
Critical hydrologic impacts from climate change: addressing an urgent global need
(Source: Sustainability Science)
Source: Sustainability Science - January 3, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: research
Decarbonisation strategies in industry: going beyond clusters
AbstractAn effective and just industrial transition is necessary both to mitigate climate change and protect jobs, and as a precursor to enable other sectors to decarbonise. Activity is at an early stage and examples of successful sector-wide interventions to decarbonise industry do not yet exist. Governments of industrialised countries are beginning to develop policy and provide funding to support deployment of carbon capture and low-carbon hydrogen infrastructures into high-emitting industrial clusters, but options for sites outside of clusters, denoted here as ‘dispersed sites’, are also required. This paper takes a...
Source: Sustainability Science - January 1, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: research
Mitigation policies buffer multiple climate stressors in a socio-ecological salt marsh habitat
AbstractClimate change strains human and natural system sustainability worldwide. Plum Island Estuary, Massachusetts (PIE MA) salt marshes are socio-environmental ecosystems experiencing two such climate stressors: sea level rise (SLR) and the mud fiddler crabMinuca pugnax (= Uca pugnax Smith) range expansion. Salt marshes are important sources of ecosystem functioning and ecosystem services. Uncertainties remain, however, whether SLR and the fiddler crab range expansion will affect PIE ecosystem functioning and services over time by changing marsh area. We, therefore, determined in this study: (1) to what degree PIE ma...
Source: Sustainability Science - January 1, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: research
Accelerating actions for leveraging a climate-neutral sustainable society
AbstractThe establishment of the Leveraging a Climate-neutral Society –strategic Research Network (LCS–RNet) (then named the International Research Network for Low Carbon Societies) was proposed at the Group of Eight (G8) Environment Ministers’ Meeting in 2008. Its 12th annual meeting in December 2021 focused on the discussion on how to transition into a just an d sustainable society and how to reduce the risks associated with the transition. This requires comprehensive studies including on the concept of transition, pathways to net-zero societies and how to realise the pathways by collaborating with various stakehol...
Source: Sustainability Science - December 29, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: research
(Too) high hopes? How Austrian energy community actors construct their roles in the energy transition
AbstractEnergy communities (ECs), as forms of social innovation, have the potential to contribute to sustainability transitions in the energy system. Hence, policymakers place great hopes in ECs as drivers of the energy transition and impose 'transformative goals' on EC actors. However, earlier work revealed differentiated motives (e.g., personal gain, hedonism, economic reasons) on the part of these actors, with system transformation not always being the most important goal. Hence, this empirical study aims to provide a more nuanced picture of how individual actors, namely, founders, intermediaries, and influential early ...
Source: Sustainability Science - December 21, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: research
Reflexive use of methods: a framework for navigating different types of knowledge and power in transformative research
AbstractIn transformative sustainability science, reflexivity is considered critical for ethically sound and socially relevant research. In practice, many transdisciplinary knowledge co-production processes have faced problems in mitigating power hierarchies among the participating actors and the different types of knowledge. In this paper, we develop and test a reflexive framework that enables transdisciplinary researchers to convey more explicitly how their methodological choices play a role in im/balancing power relations in knowledge co-production. The reflexive framework allows researchers to distinguish the different...
Source: Sustainability Science - December 20, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: research
Breaking the unsustainable paradigm: exploring the relationship between energy consumption, economic development and carbon dioxide emissions in Ecuador
This study attempts to contribute to the discussion by employing a systemic approach and methodology to examine the relationship between energy consumption (EC), gross domestic product (GDP) and carbon dioxide emissions (CO2) in Ecuador using time series from 1990 to 2018 with a mixed methodology (quantitative and qualitative). The energy balance and the enlarged Kaya identity are utilised to quantify the environmental impact of human activities. Furthermore, correlational cointegration and Granger causality tests are used to analyse the long-term and short-term relationships between variables in different sectors. The res...
Source: Sustainability Science - December 16, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: research
Processes of sustainability transformation across systems scales: leveraging systemic change in the textile sector
AbstractSustainability research emphasizes the importance of intervening with both individual and organizational behaviours as well as the systems that shape them to create sustainability transformations. However, to date there is a lack of studies that bridge the divide between small case-based interventions and global systems at broader scales, and the complex interactions across scales and processes. This paper works with a leverage points framework to consider systems transformation. It focuses on four individual sustainability interventions in the textile sector and explores how they are embedded within a complex set ...
Source: Sustainability Science - December 16, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: research
Operationalizing ambiguity in sustainability science: embracing the elephant in the room
AbstractAmbiguity is often recognized as an intrinsic aspect of addressing complex sustainability challenges. Nevertheless, in the practice of transdisciplinary sustainability research, ambiguity is often an ‘elephant in the room’ to be either side-stepped or reduced rather than explicitly mobilized in pursuit of solutions. These responses threaten the salience and legitimacy of sustainability science by masking the pluralism of real-world sustainability challenges and how research renders certain f rames visible and invisible. Critical systems thinking (CST) emerged from the efforts of operational researchers to addre...
Source: Sustainability Science - December 15, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: research
Economic inequality expanded after an extreme climate event: a long-term analysis of herders ’ household data in Mongolia
AbstractThe importance of ending poverty and reducing economic inequality has been explicitly recognized globally. Climate extremes are a critical global risk and can lead to economic damages, but empirical evidence of their effects on economic inequality is limited. Here, we focus on Mongolian pastoralism, which has a coupled socio-ecological system, to examine the trend of economic inequality among herders following a climate extreme event. Mongolia experienced a winter disaster in 2009 that caused a mortality of about 20% of the total number of livestock across the country. We used a long-term livestock panel dataset at...
Source: Sustainability Science - December 13, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: research
Identifying mindsets for urban sustainability transformation: insights from Urban Labs
AbstractIncreasing calls for transformation to address climate change and related challenges underscore the societal imperative to shift from mindsets that drive environmentally unsustainable and socially unjust processes to mindsets that enable urban sustainability transformations. However, it is not always clear what such mindsets comprise, if and how they can be shifted and under which conditions. Fragmented understandings of the concept of mindsets across disciplines and limited empirical analysis beyond Europe and North America have hindered progress in this field. To address these gaps, this article proposes a novel ...
Source: Sustainability Science - December 13, 2023 Category: Science Source Type: research
