The Global Energy Assessment (GEA) brings together over 300 international researchers to provide an independent, scientifically based, integrated and policy-relevant analysis of current and emerging energy issues and options. It has been peer-reviewed anonymously by an additional 200 international experts. The GEA assesses the major global challenges for sustainable development and their linkages to energy; the technologies and resources available for providing energy services; future energy systems that address the major challenges; and the policies and other measures that are needed to realize transformational change toward sustainable energy futures. The GEA goes beyond existing studies on energy issues by presenting a comprehensive and integrated analysis of energy chalenges, opportunities and strategies, for developing, industrialized and emerging economies. This volume is a invaluable resource for energy specialists and technologists in all sectors (academia, industry and government) as well as policymakers, development economists and practitioners in international organizations and national governments.

Global Energy Assessment: Toward a Sustainable Future

For most materials used to provide buildings, infrastructure, equipment and products, global stocks are still sufficient to meet anticipated demand, but the environmental impacts of materials production and processing, particularly those related to energy, are rapidly becoming critical. These impacts can be ameliorated to some extent by the ongoing pursuit of efficiencies within existing processes, but demand is anticipated to double in the next 40 years, and this will lead to an unacceptable increase in overall impacts unless the total requirement for material production and processing is reduced. This is the goal of material efficiency, and this paper aims to stimulate interest in the area. Four major strategies for reducing material demand through material efficiency are discussed: longer-lasting products; modularisation and remanufacturing; component re-use; designing products with less material. In industrialised nations, these strategies have had little attention, because of economic, regulatory and social barriers, which are each examined. However, evidence from waste management and the pursuit of energy efficiency suggests that these barriers might be overcome, and an outline of potential mechanisms for change is given. In bringing together insights into material efficiency from a wide range of disciplines, the paper presents a set of 20 open questions for future work.

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Material efficiency: A white paper

Highlighting the important role of marketing in encouraging sustainable consumption, the current research presents a review of the academic literature from marketing and behavioral science that exa...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0022242919825649

How to SHIFT Consumer Behaviors to be More Sustainable: A Literature Review and Guiding Framework:

Summary
The so-called circular economy—the concept of closing material loops to preserve products, parts, and materials in the industrial system and extract their maximum utility—has recently started gaining momentum. The idea of substituting lower-impact secondary production for environmentally intensive primary production gives the circular economy a strong intuitive environmental appeal. However, proponents of the circular economy have tended to look at the world purely as an engineering system and have overlooked the economic part of the circular economy. Recent research has started to question the core of the circular economy—namely, whether closing material and product loops does, in fact, prevent primary production. In this article, we argue that circular economy activities can increase overall production, which can partially or fully offset their benefits. Because there is a strong parallel in this respect to energy efficiency rebound, we have termed this effect “circular economy rebound.” Circular economy rebound occurs when circular economy activities, which have lower per-unit-production impacts, also cause increased levels of production, reducing their benefit. We describe the mechanisms that cause circular economy rebound, which include the limited ability of secondary products to substitute for primary products, and price effects. We then offer some potential strategies for avoiding circular economy rebound. However, these strategies are unlikely to be attractive to for-profit firms, so we caution that simply encouraging private firms to find profitable opportunities in the circular economy is likely to cause rebound and lower or eliminate the potential environmental benefits.

Circular economy rebound

Physics shows that energy is necessary for economic production and, therefore, economic growth but the mainstream theory of economic growth, except for specialized resource economics models, pays no attention to the role of energy. This paper reviews the relevant biophysical theory and mainstream, resource economics, and ecological economics models of growth. A possible synthesis of energy-based and mainstream models is presented. This model shows that when energy is scarce it imposes a strong constraint on the growth of the economy but when energy is abundant its effect on economic growth is much reduced. This explains the industrial revolution as a releasing of the constraints on economic growth due to the development of methods of using coal and the discovery of new fossil fuel resources. Time series analysis shows that energy and GDP cointegrate and energy use Granger causes GDP when capital and other production inputs are included in the vector autoregression model. There are, however, various mechanisms that can weaken the links between energy and growth. The empirical literature finds that energy used per unit of economic output has declined in developed and some developing countries, due to both technological change and to a shift from poorer quality fuels such as coal to the use of higher quality fuels, and especially electricity. Substitution of other inputs for energy and sectoral shifts in economic activity play smaller roles.

/pdf/the-role-of-energy-in-economic-growth-10cmao34yv.pdf

The Role of Energy in Economic Growth

Empirical estimates of the direct rebound effect: A review

The challenge of monitoring biodiversity in payment for environmental service interventions

Community-based natural resource management bodies, including Community Resource Boards (CRBs) and Community Scouts, are responsible for governance and wildlife law enforcement in Zambia’s Game Management Areas (GMA), community lands that buffer the National Parks. Despite commitments to inclusive governance and benefit sharing, men dominate the wildlife and natural resource sectors in Zambia; they make up the vast majority of wildlife scouts who patrol the GMAs and hold most positions on the CRBs who allocate benefits and decide on management priorities. Gender blind structures within community governance institutions during the recruitment and training process and social and gender norms that see leadership roles as men’s domain act as barriers to women’s participation in the sector. In response, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) invested in a comprehensive package of activities to increase women’s effective participation in wildlife governance and law enforcement, including gender-responsive CRB elections, empowerment training for newly elected women candidates, revised community scout training curriculum, and capacity building support for organizations that support scouts and CRBs. The intervention helped increase women’s representation in CRBs from four percent to 25 percent in pilot communities. It also supported the Department of National Parks and Wildlife (DNPW) to recruit the first gender balanced cohort of community scout recruits and field an all-women patrol unit in Lower Zambezi National Park.

Matt M. Sommerville

Papers

Empirical estimates of the direct rebound effect: A review

The challenge of monitoring biodiversity in payment for environmental service interventions

Increasing women’s participation in wildlife governance in Zambia