Paper has shaped society for centuries and is considered one of humanity's most important inventions. However, pulp and paper products can be damaging to social and natural systems along their lifecycle of material extraction, processing, transportation, and waste handling. The pulp and paper industry is among the top five most energy-intensive industries globally and is the fourth largest industrial energy user. This industry accounts for approximately 6% of global industrial energy use and 2% of direct industrial CO2 emissions. The pulp and paper industry is also the largest user of original or virgin wood, with deleterious impacts on both human health and local flora and fauna, including aquatic ecosystems. This critical and systematic review seeks to identify alternatives for mitigating the climate impacts of pulp and paper processes and products, thus making the pulp and paper industry more environmentally sustainable. This study reviews 466 studies to answer the following questions: what are the main determinants of energy and carbon emissions emerging from the pulp and paper industry? What are the benefits of this industry adopting low-carbon manufacturing processes, and what barriers will need to be tackled to enable such adoption? Using a sociotechnical lens, we answer these questions, identify barriers for the pulp and paper industry's decarbonization, and present promising avenues for future research. 

http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/106832/5/1-s2.0-S1364032122005950-main.pdf

Decarbonizing the pulp and paper industry: A critical and systematic review of sociotechnical developments and policy options

Aviation accounts for approximately five percent of global greenhouse gas emissions through the combustion of fossil fuels. This paper analyses the opportunities and challenges of mitigation measures in limiting travel volume, energy and emission intensity to reduce the climate impact of aviation in Sweden. Several measures are in place that aim to reduce the climate impact of the aviation industry, ranging from regulations to technology alternatives to fossil-based jet fuel. These measures face several crosscutting challenges, many of which are of a socio-economic and political nature, and these aspects are often neglected in favour of focusing on technological solutions. The market creation for alternatives to fossil-based jet fuel is a major challenge, as most consumers today have a limited awareness of and willingness to pay for these innovations. Policy measures in place are proven ineffective in incentivising change. An understanding of the industry as a socio-technical system is required. The value of this review is its broader consideration of the pathways to reduce aviation's climate impact, offering new perspectives and pointing to areas for further research considering all components, their interactions and interdependence. 

Analysing the opportunities and challenges for mitigating the climate impact of aviation: A narrative review

The Philippine coalscape emerged from state-sponsored support for coal that civil society continually challenges. This paper examines how this coalscape was produced from contesting sociotechnical imaginaries and by whom. The article highlights how the state circulated the imaginaries of support towards coal import, domestic mining, and combustion for electricity using the scripts of energy security for national development. At the same time, it also sheds light on how proponents of an anti-coal imaginary used their scripts of energy transition, energy justice, and energy democracy. Using primary data from interviews, supplemented by a review of policy documents, news reports, and popular articles, this paper maps the scripts that proponents employ to produce these imaginaries. On the one hand, scripts on affordability, access, and reliability have shored up the pro-coal imaginary in the Philippines, which, altogether, converge into a grand imaginary of securing domestic energy supply to address the country’s economic development. On the other hand, the scripts of polycentric social mobilizations for just and democratizing energy transition against pollution, human rights abuses (especially on Indigenous Peoples), and climate action buttressed an anti-coal imaginary. Putting into the spotlight these conflicting imaginaries provides insights into the intricate associations of energy systems with the environment, human rights, sustainability, and climate.

Committing to coal? Scripts, sociotechnical imaginaries, and the resurgence of a coal regime in the Philippines

• The policy discourse on negative emissions is rapidly gaining momentum. • A discursive shift towards deployment is evident. • BECCS and afforestation are the most prominent land-based technologies in the discourse. • Most actors are based in the Global North; 61% refer to Global South in statements. • 116 policy documents from 2013 to 2019 were manually coded and analyzed. Negative emissions are increasingly seen as a policy option to limit climate change. However, the most readily available technologies that could deliver negative emissions require, if deployed at scale, large amounts of land, with huge risks for livelihoods and the environment. This land is often assumed to be in the Global South. This article analyzes the nascent policy discourse on negative emissions by assessing 116 policy documents by 97 organizations with a focus on land-based technologies (afforestation and reforestation, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, biochar, soil carbon sequestration). We conclude that this policy discourse is largely centered in the Global North (mostly in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany), with only five organizations directly linked to the Global South. 61% of the organizations in our sample, however, somehow refer to the Global South in their contributions, with nongovernmental organizations being most strongly focused on the role of the Global South and in particular the risks for vulnerable countries. While the earlier policy discourse on negative emissions was linked to a more general “geoengineering” discourse, this link has loosened in the last years. Overall, in the documents that we studied, negative emissions technologies seem to become more accepted, and parts of the discourse shift towards deployment. Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage seems more often associated with risks if compared to other land-based negative emissions technologies, especially with a view to the Global South. 

The policy discourse on negative emissions, land-based technologies, and the Global South

Geoengineering technologies are increasingly proposed as a necessary strategy to address climate change. How does the prospect of these technologies affect public support for traditional mitigation strategies that involve emission reductions? Recent research yields mixed results. Some evidence points to a moral hazard or risk compensation effect (i.e., less support for climate change mitigation). Other research finds evidence of heightened risk salience (i.e., more support for climate change mitigation), and still other work finds no effect at all. Focusing on carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies, we investigate whether these inconsistent findings result from differences in how the technologies are described against the backdrop of climate change. Specifically, we examine whether including explicit information (or not) about the impacts of climate change alters how information about CDR is received. Building on previous work, we designed two experiments to elucidate the circumstances under which information about CDR elicits a risk compensatory, risk salience, or null response among the public. Results predominantly align with a null effect from CDR information, although mixed results in Study 1 suggest the possibility of a very small risk compensation effect, depending on whether political ideology is controlled for. There was no evidence of a risk salience effect. However, information about the impacts of climate change increased perceived threat and, indirectly, policy support. We, thus, recommend that future studies of risk compensation and risk salience effects account for the provision of climate impacts information and political ideology. 

Moral hazard or not? The effects of learning about carbon dioxide removal on perceptions of climate mitigation in the United States

This article analyses competing, emerging visions on the role and governance of negative emissions technologies (NETs) in Sweden. Using the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries, we explore different visions of NETs, how they relate to each other and how prevailing socioeconomic interests constrain their prospects for institutional stabilisation. Through an interpretive and qualitative analysis of interviews and publicly available documents, we identify various negative emission imaginaries that differ in their degree of contestation and institutionalisation. We find relatively high agreement on the desirable role of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) in Swedish energy systems, while measures in the land-use sector appear more contested. These differences can be attributed to conflicts/alignment with existing imaginaries of the bioeconomy in Sweden, with energy systems already highly oriented towards bioenergy use, and with the political and economic interests that underlie these conditions.

Kirstine Lund Christiansen

Papers

What ‘climate positive future’? Emerging sociotechnical imaginaries of negative emissions in Sweden

“Our burgers eat carbon”: Investigating the discourses of corporate net-zero commitments