How the COVID-19 pandemic changed stakeholder engagement processes in sustainability research in the long-term.

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic affected stakeholder engagement in sustainability research projects in many ways. But which effects appear permanent today, after the pandemic ended? Methods: To address this, we interviewed researchers and stakeholders and carried out a survey among European sustainability research projects in 2022. Results: We find that the pandemic years disrupted stakeholder-based research, also with lasting effects. The forced shift to online modes showed how digital engagement can bring benefits in terms of easier and more efficient stakeholder engagement, but also that important aspects are lost, particularly regarding intensity of collaboration and depth of insights. Whether to go online or stay offline depends largely on the research objective, which stakeholders to involve, and how well researchers and stakeholders already know each other. Most researchers and stakeholders want to continue online collaboration in the long term, especially those with positive online collaboration experiences from the pandemic years. Conclusions: The pandemic has a long-term impact on stakeholder engagement in research; online engagement cannot replace all benefit of previous in-person interactions with stakeholders, but it has led to digital innovations and expanded the engagement portfolio. Our research has provided qualitative insights into the impact of the pandemic on stakeholder engagement in various sustainability research projects and the implications for the long-term future that are relevant to researchers and funding agencies.

Visions for our future regional electricity system: Citizen preferences in four EU countries.

As climate targets tighten, all countries must transition toward a renewable electricity system, but conflicts about generation and infrastructure deployment impede transition progress. Although the triggers of opposition are well studied, what people want remains understudied. We survey citizen preferences for a renewable electricity future through a conjoint analysis among 4,103 individuals in Denmark, Portugal, Poland, and Germany. With our study we go beyond the Likert scale survey approach specifically seeking trade-offs and contextualized preferences for regional electricity system designs. We show the importance of identifying both the "least preferred" and "most preferred" solutions and highlighting the possibility of identifying very different systems with identical utility. Lastly, our research actively bridges the divide between social aspects and techno-economic modeling, promoting their integration. We show that the most preferred system design in all four countries is a predominantly regional one, based on rooftop solar, communally owned, and not relying on transmission expansion.

Most industrialised countries have peaked carbon dioxide emissions during economic crises through strengthened structural change.

As the climate targets tighten and countries are impacted by several crises, understanding how and under which conditions carbon dioxide emissions peak and start declining is gaining importance. We assess the timing of emissions peaks in all major emitters (1965-2019) and the extent to which past economic crises have impacted structural drivers of emissions contributing to emission peaks. We show that in 26 of 28 countries that have peaked emissions, the peak occurred just before or during a recession through the combined effect of lower economic growth (1.5 median percentage points per year) and decreasing energy and/or carbon intensity (0.7) during and after the crisis. In peak-and-decline countries, crises have typically magnified pre-existing improvements in structural change. In non-peaking countries, economic growth was less affected, and structural change effects were weaker or increased emissions. Crises do not automatically trigger peaks but may strengthen ongoing decarbonisation trends through several mechanisms.

The European 2030 climate and energy package: do domestic strategy adaptations precede EU policy change?

The European Union's 2030 climate and energy package introduced fundamental changes compared to its 2020 predecessor. These changes included a stronger focus on the internal market and an increased emphasis on technology-neutral decarbonization while simultaneously de-emphasizing the renewables target. This article investigates whether changes in domestic policy strategies of leading member states in European climate policy preceded the observed changes in EU policy. Disaggregating strategic change into changes in different elements (goals, objectives, instrumental logic), allows us to go beyond analyzing the relative prioritization of different goals, and to analyze how policy requirements for reaching those goals were dynamically redefined over time. To this end, we introduce a new method, which based on insights from social network analysis, enables us to systematically trace those strategic chances. We find that shifts in national strategies of the investigated member states preceded the shift in EU policy. In particular, countries reframed their understanding of supply security, and pushed for the internal electricity market also as a security measure to balance fluctuating renewables. Hence, the increasing focus on markets and market integration in the European 2030 package echoed the increasingly central role of the internal market for electricity supply security in national strategies. These findings also highlight that countries dynamically redefined their goals relative to the different phases of the energy transition.

Drop-in fuels from sunlight and air.

Aviation and shipping currently contribute approximately 8% of total anthropogenic CO2 emissions, with growth in tourism and global trade projected to increase this contribution further1-3. Carbon-neutral transportation is feasible with electric motors powered by rechargeable batteries, but is challenging, if not impossible, for long-haul commercial travel, particularly air travel4. A promising solution are drop-in fuels (synthetic alternatives for petroleum-derived liquid hydrocarbon fuels such as kerosene, gasoline or diesel) made from H2O and CO2 by solar-driven processes5-7. Among the many possible approaches, the thermochemical path using concentrated solar radiation as the source of high-temperature process heat offers potentially high production rates and efficiencies8, and can deliver truly carbon-neutral fuels if the required CO2 is obtained directly from atmospheric air9. If H2O is also extracted from air10, feedstock sourcing and fuel production can be colocated in desert regions with high solar irradiation and limited access to water resources. While individual steps of such a scheme have been implemented, here we demonstrate the operation of the entire thermochemical solar fuel production chain, from H2O and CO2 captured directly from ambient air to the synthesis of drop-in transportation fuels (for example, methanol and kerosene), with a modular 5 kWthermal pilot-scale solar system operated under field conditions. We further identify the research and development efforts and discuss the economic viability and policies required to bring these solar fuels to market.

The COVID-19 crisis deepens the gulf between leaders and laggards in the global energy transition.

In this article, we review the main impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global energy sector and evaluate the implications of related policy responses on prospects for a transition to a climate-friendly energy system. In doing so, we differentiate between different types of countries and different dimensions of energy supply. Firstly, we assess the impacts on leaders and laggards in the transformation of the power sector, in terms of renewable power deployment and the phase-out of coal-fired power generation. Secondly, we consider impacts of the crisis on major exporters of oil and gas resources, focusing on a selection of G20 countries. We find that the impact of the COVID-19 crisis and related policy responses vary across different types of countries but also within large countries, such as the US and China. We conclude that the COVID-19 crisis deepens the gulf between leaders and laggards of the global energy transition and will exacerbate existing imbalances in an uneven energy transition landscape. This threatens the achievement of international climate targets and points to the need for concerted international action aimed at the phase-out of fossil energy resources.

COVID-19 vs. stakeholder engagement: the impact of coronavirus containment measures on stakeholder involvement in European energy research projects.

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has affected societies and economies around the world, and the scientific community is no exception. Whereas the importance of stakeholder engagement in research has grown quickly the consequences of the pandemic on this has so far not been empirically studied. In this paper, we investigate the effects of the COVID-19 crisis on European energy research, in particular the stakeholder work, during the first wave of the coronavirus in spring and summer 2020. We pose the research questions: (i) How much of a problem are the coronavirus containment measures for stakeholder engagement? (ii) How have researchers coped with the situation, and (iii) How do they evaluate alternative stakeholder activities implemented? We conducted an online survey among European energy research projects with stakeholder engagement between June and August 2020. We found that only one of six engagement activities could be implemented as planned, whereas almost half were cancelled or delayed. The most common coping strategies were changing involvement formats - mainly to webinars or online workshops - or postponement. Whereas respondents are largely satisfied with one-to-one and unidirectional online formats, such as webinars, online interviews, and online surveys, they see interactive group activities as less suitable for online engagement. Most respondents plan to continue using online formats to complement, but not to replace, physical meetings in future research. All long-term effects remain to be seen, but given the postponement of many stakeholder involvement activities, many projects may face problems at later stages of their realisation. These findings suggest that the pandemic may have catalysed a rapid introduction of specific online formats in academic stakeholder interaction processes.

Trade-Offs between Geographic Scale, Cost, and Infrastructure Requirements for Fully Renewable Electricity in Europe.

The European potential for renewable electricity is sufficient to enable fully renewable supply on different scales, from self-sufficient, subnational regions to an interconnected continent. We not only show that a continental-scale system is the cheapest, but also that systems on the national scale and below are possible at cost penalties of 20% or less. Transmission is key to low cost, but it is not necessary to vastly expand the transmission system. When electricity is transmitted only to balance fluctuations, the transmission grid size is comparable to today's, albeit with expanded cross-border capacities. The largest differences across scales concern land use and thus social acceptance: in the continental system, generation capacity is concentrated on the European periphery, where the best resources are. Regional systems, in contrast, have more dispersed generation. The key trade-off is therefore not between geographic scale and cost, but between scale and the spatial distribution of required generation and transmission infrastructure.

Blue skies over China: The effect of pollution-control on solar power generation and revenues.

Air pollution is the single most important environmental health risk, causing about 7 million premature deaths annually worldwide. China is the world's largest emitter of anthropogenic air pollutants, which causes major negative health consequences. The Chinese government has implemented several policies to reduce air pollution, with success in some but far from all sectors. In addition to the health benefits, reducing air pollution will have side-benefits, such as an increase in the electricity generated by the solar photovoltaic panels via an increase in surface solar irradiance through a reduction of haze and aerosol-impacted clouds. We use the global aerosol-climate model ECHAM6-HAM2 with the bottom-up emissions inventory from the Community Emission Data System and quantify the geographically specific increases in generation and economic revenue to the Chinese solar photovoltaic fleet as a result of reducing or eliminating air pollution from the energy, industrial, transport, and residential and commercial sectors. We find that by 2040, the gains will be substantial: the projected solar photovoltaic fleet would produce between 85-158 TWh/year of additional power in clean compared to polluted air, generating US$6.9-10.1 billion of additional annual revenues in the solar photovoltaic sector alone. Furthermore, we quantify the cost of adopting best-practice emission standards in all sectors and find that the revenue gains from the increased solar photovoltaic generation could offset up to about 13-17% of the costs of strong air pollution control measures designed to reach near-zero emissions in all sectors. Hence, reducing air pollution in China will not only have clear health benefits, but the side-effect of increased solar power generation would also offset a sizeable share of the costs of air pollution control measures.

Bioenergy production and sustainable development: science base for policymaking remains limited.

The possibility of using bioenergy as a climate change mitigation measure has sparked a discussion of whether and how bioenergy production contributes to sustainable development. We undertook a systematic review of the scientific literature to illuminate this relationship and found a limited scientific basis for policymaking. Our results indicate that knowledge on the sustainable development impacts of bioenergy production is concentrated in a few well-studied countries, focuses on environmental and economic impacts, and mostly relates to dedicated agricultural biomass plantations. The scope and methodological approaches in studies differ widely and only a small share of the studies sufficiently reports on context and/or baseline conditions, which makes it difficult to get a general understanding of the attribution of impacts. Nevertheless, we identified regional patterns of positive or negative impacts for all categories - environmental, economic, institutional, social and technological. In general, economic and technological impacts were more frequently reported as positive, while social and environmental impacts were more frequently reported as negative (with the exception of impacts on direct substitution of GHG emission from fossil fuel). More focused and transparent research is needed to validate these patterns and develop a strong science underpinning for establishing policies and governance agreements that prevent/mitigate negative and promote positive impacts from bioenergy production.