The circular economy has established itself as a dominant sustainability paradigm, yet the formal properties of its foundational metaphor, the circle, remain unexamined. This paper identifies two analytically distinct constraints embedded in the dominant circular imaginary. The first is topological: when the operative metaphor functions as a single closed loop, it reproduces the cycle graph, a one-dimensional structure with zero redundancy and minimal resilience. The second is temporal: the assessment apparatus associated with circularity operates within quantitative, sequential time (chronos) and renders qualitative, heterogeneous temporalities (kairos) structurally invisible. The claim defended here is specific. Sustainability paradigms generally pose time as a problem left open; the circular economy's founding metaphor figures time as resolved (return, cycle, regeneration) while its apparatus operationalizes only chronos. This blindness is not general ignorance but performative contradiction. Empirical evidence from three continents (African solar projects, Mexican circular assessment, Peruvian extraction) substantiates the diagnosis. We propose a polyrhythmic completion structured as a wheel, with Doughnut Economics as the rim, regeneration as the hub, and ArtefactKairos (institutional devices for temporal composition) as the spokes, operationalized through the Temporal Composition Diagnostic (TCD), a four-step governance protocol. The TCD is applied to a published sugar beet pulp biorefinery assessment that models feedstock as a fixed daily input without addressing the seasonal harvest sustaining it, then calibrated ex ante against the Antamina mining region in Peru. In both settings it reveals what standard assessment cannot detect and specifies the institutional clauses it would generate.
The social value of clean electricity depends not only on how much is generated but also on whether power systems can absorb and deliver it for use rather than curtail it. This study examines whether improved clean energy accommodation reduces households' health-related defensive expenditure. Using China's Plan on Clean Energy Accommodation as a quasi-natural experiment and micro-panel data from the China Family Panel Studies for 2012–2022, we find that the policy reduced residents' out-of-pocket medical expenditure in policy-targeted regions by about 18% on average, with larger reductions among rural residents and in regions facing larger pre-policy accommodation gaps. Consistent with this reduction, supporting evidence indicates that the policy reduced renewable curtailment, increased realized clean electricity output, and improved ambient air quality; it was also associated with cleaner household energy use and more frequent exercise, especially in rural areas. These gains, however, were unevenly distributed, with larger effects in net electricity-exporting and resource-rich regions, areas with limited healthcare service capacity, and among lower-income, male, and middle-aged residents. An illustrative calculation suggests potential annual savings of RMB 261.2 billion (US$38.3 billion) in out-of-pocket medical expenditure across the policy-targeted regions. These findings underscore the importance of clean energy accommodation and provide evidence to inform policies aimed at translating renewable electricity into more equitable household welfare gains.
In this paper, we examine the localized smoke health trade-off associated with prescribed burning as a wildfire mitigation policy. Prescribed burning is frequently justified on the basis that it generates less smoke than the wildfires it helps to mitigate; however, research on this topic remains limited, largely due to challenges in obtaining suitable data. This analysis addresses this gap by presenting the first bioeconomic-health model of prescribed burning that incorporates a stochastic wildfire component, with a focus on four distinct forest types distributed across the continental United States. The analysis focuses on localized smoke-related health impacts for a representative community located downwind of a treated hectare, allowing us to isolate the immediate smoke-related health costs of prescribed burning and compare them with the expected reductions in future wildfire smoke-related health impacts from that same hectare. Under the model assumptions, the results indicate that the localized smoke-related mortality damages associated with prescribed burning exceed the expected reductions in future wildfire smoke-related mortality damages on a per-hectare, per-100,000 population basis, with substantial variation across forest types. These results address an important externality associated with prescribed burning in that nearby communities in the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) may repeatedly experience smoke exposure from prescribed fires, while many additional benefits of prescribed burning, including reductions in wildfire spread, property losses, and ecosystem damages, may accrue over larger spatial scales or to populations outside the treated area.
Collective decisions to retrofit multi-family residential buildings require co-owners to agree on how the total cost is divided among dwellings, yet the distributional properties of alternative allocation rules have been insufficiently investigated at scale. Using harmonised Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) microdata covering over 4 million apartments in almost 450,000 buildings across Poland, England and Wales, and the Netherlands, we simulate five allocation rules: area-proportional, progressive-area, emissions-proportional, inefficiency-proportional, and Shapley-value allocation. For each building, we evaluate the resulting cost-share distributions using within-building inequality indices, size-progressivity measures, and cooperative-game-theoretic stability criteria. We find that performance-based rules produce within-building Gini coefficients 2 to 11 times higher than area-proportional allocation, with systematic variation across national building stocks. These rules are also less proportional in terms of dwelling size, assigning larger cost shares to smaller dwellings than their floor-area shares warrant. The Shapley rule, often advocated on cooperative-game-theoretic grounds, routinely allocates more to a single dwelling than that dwelling's stand-alone retrofit cost. The results show that cost-allocation rules generate distributional and stability consequences at policy-relevant magnitudes. For retrofit governance in multi-owner buildings, allocation design should therefore be treated as a central component of policy implementation rather than a technical-administrative choice.
As climate change intensifies extreme heat, heat-health policies increasingly use alerts, forecasts, and behavioral guidance to encourage individual self-protection. Evaluations of such policies often track survey-based intermediate outcomes, including warning awareness, perceived heat risk or vulnerability, and protective behavior, in addition to health outcomes. Yet routine self-protection can make reported risk perceptions difficult to interpret: perceived risk may motivate prevention, while reported risk may already reflect the protection that respondents have adopted. In a web-based survey of residents of Tokyo's 23 wards, we elicit subjective probabilities of heatstroke under realized and counterfactual prevention scenarios. Respondents are randomly assigned to evaluate either a no-prevention scenario or a full-prevention scenario. Reported risk changes systematically with the assumed level of prevention, suggesting that reported risk perceptions may reflect both perceived susceptibility and behavior-conditioned reappraisal and may be misleading as stand-alone indicators in adaptation monitoring and evaluation. We also find that perceived risk under the no-prevention scenario is positively associated with realized preventive effort, suggesting that this counterfactual belief provides a more interpretable basis than realized-prevention risk for examining how perceived susceptibility relates to preventive effort.
