Despite comparable solar irradiation and strong economic capacity, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden exhibit markedly different solar photovoltaics (PV) deployment trajectories. By 2025, Denmark and Sweden had each surpassed 5 GW of installed PV capacity, while Finland and Norway had only recently reached 1 GW. This paper explains these divergent outcomes by comparing market dimensions, energy resource endowments, and policy development across these four Nordic countries. Secondary data on PV deployment, electricity prices, cost of capital, energy mixes, and policy instruments shows that differences in solar diffusion cannot explain the different deployment rates. Instead, deployment patterns are strongly shaped by policy design, timing, and stability, and by how PV competes with incumbent low-carbon resources. Countries with early, generous, but unstable support schemes experienced rapid yet volatile growth, while more gradual and predictable policy frameworks enabled steadier expansion. Further, high end-user electricity prices and access to low-cost capital have favored distributed, self-consumption-oriented PV, whereas weak incentives and complex permitting have constrained utility-scale deployment. These findings highlight how accountable energy governance-through clear targets, stable policy frameworks, and limited politicization-conditions solar PV diffusion in wealthy latecomer countries. The identified key dynamics are broadly applicable to wealthy latecomers in national energy transitions.
Transitioning to a circular economy (CE) entails a fundamental shift in how resources are produced, consumed, and valued in society. This presents challenges and opportunities for innovation across industries. Using absorptive capacity (ACAP) as a lens, we conceptualize the dynamics shaping firms' perceptions of drivers and barriers in CE innovation processes. We aim to better understand the reasons for the limited adoption of CE and how innovation processes emerge within and between firms. Through a longitudinal process study, we tracked how a collective of firms addressed the challenge of post-consumer plastic (PCP) waste in the Norwegian aquaculture industry. Our findings suggest that perceptions change over time as firms explore, assimilate, and exploit new knowledge from interactions between firm-level and the collective level. Moving from a static identification to a dynamic understanding, we captured how changing perceptions can cause shifting framings of drivers and barriers. We develop a framework that depicts how tensions are mitigated over time, in parallel with increasing adoption of CE, underscoring the need for a processual perspective. These insights are illustrated using the example of the world's first net pen walkways made of recycled PCP. Furthermore, we outline recommendations for policymakers and industry, particularly regarding the role of ‘Learning alliances’ and implications for the use of post-consumer materials across industries. Our study adds to the literature on circular economy innovation (CEI) by elucidating how drivers and barriers unfold and by highlighting the roles of collective ACAP and interaction in overcoming barriers to CE.
Underwater robots typically use both cameras and sonar for perception to leverage the rich semantic details of vision and the robust range measurements of acoustics. However, learning to map between these modalities via cross-modal prediction remains underexplored due to limited sonar-visual paired datasets. We present SOVIS, a sonar-visual dataset for cross-modal underwater perception. SOVIS comprises over 76,000 paired frames collected across 17 dives at six sites in the Trondheimfjord, supported by an end-to-end pipeline that cleans and synchronizes the cross-modal sensor data. We also introduce an interactive annotation tool designed to accelerate the labeling process for this paired data. Finally, we demonstrate a proof-of-concept cross-modal fish detection task using a small subset of labeled data, achieving a 7x improvement in mAP@0.10 over a monocular camera baseline. SOVIS serves as the first step toward advancing cross-modal underwater perception research, enabling research directions such as dense sonar prediction from monocular images.
Ferromanganese (FeMn) is an essential alloy whose production relies on metallurgical coke as a reducing agent, leading to hard-to-abate carbon dioxide emissions. The use of biocarbon as an alternative reductant and carbon capture and storage (CCS) are key mitigation strategies of FeMn production, yet their environmental performances are still unexplored. This study evaluates the possible environmental co-benefits and trade-offs of replacing metallurgical coke with biocarbon, with and without CCS, in Norway. The climate impact of FeMn production is 2312 f 110 kg CO2-equivalents per tonne of alloy (mean f 5th/95th percentiles). Emission reductions are about 57 f 3.0 % at a full substitution rate and 29 f 3.7 % at a more realistic substitution rate of 50 %. CCS alone can reduce emissions of 53 f 4.8 %. The combination of biocarbon with CCS can achieve negative emissions when the biocarbon substitution is higher than 78 %. More efficient material and energy use throughout the value chain is key to maximise climate benefits. The main trade-offs can occur with terrestrial acidification and particulate matter formation, and are mostly due to biomass pyrolysis. A 50 % substitution of the metallurgical coke annually used for FeMn production in Norway requires around 25 % of currently unused forest residues, or 8 % of the today's wood harvest volume. Although some economic and technological barriers remain to be overcome, this study offers an initial quantification of the environmental implications that can be expected from a value chain perspective in connection to local resource availability and technical challenges.
Restoration of degraded marine and coastal areas is a priority set by European policy makers, as exemplified by the recent adoption of the European Nature Restoration Law (NRL) in June 2024. This legislation-driven approach is expected to expand the European marine restoration community rapidly as the amount of funding and projects grows to meet the targets outlined by the NRL However, it is difficult to assess the success of restoration activities which is vital to ensure the viability of upscaling. Furthermore, best practices are not well established in the marine realm and scientific networks are still in their early stages of development. Here, we outline our development of a digital, online toolbox for marine restoration in collaboration with the European restoration community. The toolbox aims to go beyond simply making data FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) through the creation of science-based digital services that allow for use of information for decision-making for marine restoration. The toolbox is constructed in a modular way to fulfil the needs of a diverse range of users across Europe and includes a centralized space to find methodological approaches, relevant networks, funding opportunities, and resources. The digital tools under development will be openly accessible through the Blue-Cloud 2026 platform within the thematic virtual research environment for marine restoration, which allows for the scalable use and reuse of data and code by any interested user. The toolbox aims to provide restoration community members science-based methods from which they can leverage and accelerate their restoration projects. In the pursuit to democratize access to best practices and knowledge, we go beyond providing code or data in static repositories. Based on our experience, we encourage others that are developing toolboxes or knowledge bases for diverse user groups to consider taking advantage of publicly funded infrastructure to promote their work according to open science practices.
