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The transformation of energy systems is influencing economic policy agendas all over the world, particularly in industrialized countries. In this process, Germany has taken a pioneering role, and hence the technical innovations, legal frameworks, and business models established there are also of interest for other countries trying to achieve broader use of renewable energies. Energy cooperatives have been an important building block in the energy transition in Germany, although their practical importance is neither quantitatively nor qualitatively reflected in the academic literature. Drawing on recently collected data, this paper presents an overview of German energy cooperatives in terms of organization, financing, and membership. We then review literature from economics and the social sciences that has been used to analyze cooperatives on various levels in other fields. We discuss how these theories could be applied to create a better understanding of energy cooperatives, and we derive a preliminary research agenda for their analysis. We also assess the scope for interdisciplinary work among economists, sociologists, and other disciplines.
The industry sector accounted for just over 30% of global GHG emissions in 2010 and scenarios envisage a continuing rise in demand for energy-intensive materials. This article sums up the most recent international analysis (IPCC, IEA, UNIDO, Global Energy Assessment) to give a broad view of the current prospects for reducing GHG emissions in industry. It does so from a global perspective, complementing where necessary where regional and sector-specific case studies. The article addresses the portfolio of options available, their technical and economic potentials, the experience in the use of policy instruments in industry, the synergies and tradeoffs that mitigation in the industry sector can have with other policy objectives, and the specific concerns of developing countries. Long-term decarbonisation pathways for the sector are also presented.
Urban GHG emissions and resource flows : methods for understanding the complex functioning of cities
(2015)
This paper sums up the recent developments in concepts and methods being used to measure the impacts of cities on environmental sustainability. It differentiates between a dominant trend in research literature that concentrates on the accounting and allocation of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and energy use to cities, and a re-emergence of studies focusing on the direct and indirect urban material and resource flows. The availability of reliable data and standard protocols is greater in the GHG accounting field and continues to grow rapidly.
For a long time, water shortages and flooding have been challenges in many parts of China. Meanwhile, the Chinese government announced the change of water management from engineering-oriented approach towards integrated approach in the last decades. However, the announced changes in management approach does not necessarily lead to the wide implementation of institutions, infrastructures and practice. They can be confronted by a strong resistance from the existing management approach. In fact, the development of water resources management is a complex process. Such a complexity raise the following questions: did fundamental changes really take place in the structure of water supply and demand management and flood management in China? If yes, how? In order to answer this question, the author (1) developed conceptual frameworks to enable a detailed and precise analysis of regime development; (2)applied the elaborated conceptual frameworks to explore the development of the water resources management regime in China, at the example of three case studies. These three case studies were: - Flood Management (IFM) took place in the Dongting Lake Area in the middle Yangtze River, - Water allocation in the Yellow River Basin, - The experimentation period of Water Saving Society in China. With the support of the developed framework, the case studies show that fundamental changes, i.e. transitions, have taken place in flood management regime and water supply-demand regime in China, but transitions have not yet completed, due to, namely, the lack of reconfiguration of other regime components and other relevant regimes. In addition, the case studies also depict how the start of transitions were triggered and how informal learning processes influenced regime development. The thesis contributed to sustainability transitions research by developing an operational approach to analyze transitions of water resource management regime and by expanding the empirical basis for transitions research to natural resources management regime in emerging economies.
Measuring progress towards sustainable development requires appropriate frameworks and databases. The System of Environmental-Economic Accounts (SEEA) is undergoing continuous refinement with these objectives in mind. In SEEA, there is a need for databases to encompass the global dimension of societal metabolism. In this paper, we focus on the latest effort to construct a global multi-regional input-output database (EXIOBASE) with a focus on environmentally relevant activities. The database and its broader analytical framework allows for the as yet most detailed insight into the production-related impacts and "footprints" of our consumption. We explore the methods used to arrive at the database, and some key relationships extracted from the database.