This article explores the practices of solar panel recycling in the southwest United States at a facility claiming to process solar panels from all 50 states, offering an exemplary site to explore the dilemmas and experiences of solar panel reuse or disposal. Finding that recycling is often conflated with disposal, leading to partially or fully landfilling solar panels, the article argues for the urgent advancement, incentivization and regulation of solar panel recycling. Positioning solar panel disposal within political ecology and toxic geography, the article first provides an overview of the solar panel recycling literature. After discussing the approach, methods and challenges related to this body of research, we explore the operation, social perception and regulatory issues related to solar panel recycling. This entails reflecting on the idea of solar capitalism, and “renewable capital,” to highlight the challenges, harms and uncertainties related to solar panel disposal. The section concludes by reflecting on the various policy measures and practices that can mitigate the harms of solar panel discard, and avoiding its transformation into waste by reinforcing and expanding recycling regulations.

Household-level energy-saving behaviors help mitigate climate change within the broader energy transition. However, existing studies have primarily emphasized direct economic incentive interventions, with relatively little attention to energy-saving behaviors in the private sphere. This study examines the drivers of private-sphere energy efficiency behaviors in a non-Western context of residential buildings, focusing on social norms, awareness, and perceived personal responsibility in China. Building from previous assertions of social practice theory, we assess whether individuals feel personally responsible for building-related emissions and whether they view occupants as the primary agents to enact operational efficiency. Using an original survey dataset of 1,042 respondents in China, we analyze both ongoing behaviors, such as turning off lights and A/C, and one-off actions, including home energy efficiency upgrades. Hierarchical regression models sequentially examine the effects of demographics, social norms, awareness, and personal responsibility. Results indicate that social normative pressures and awareness predict engagement in energy efficiency behaviors, whereas perceptions of personal responsibility do not. These findings suggest that individuals adopt desirable efficiency behaviors even without strong sense of responsibility or self-efficacy motivation, highlighting the potential of leveraging normative influence and information campaigns to overcome behavioral barriers and advance decarbonization in the residential building sector.

Although vital to the digital economy and growth of artificial intelligence (AI), datacenters impose significant environmental and sustainability impacts: they are estimated worldwide to have a larger carbon footprint than the global aviation industry due to their high energy usage. Currently, about 3% of global electricity is consumed by datacenters, which is expected to increase due to escalating demand for emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, the internet of things, and cryptocurrency mining. As the datacenter industry is expected to grow in capacity to serve European and global needs, it is essential to study its sustainability impacts across multiple dimensions relying on real world examples. In this article, we provide a whole-systems analysis on datacenters located in Norway, Germany, and Denmark, where we evaluate datacenters' impact on sustainability and CO2 emissions, as well as first-order estimates of materials usage, water consumption, and waste flows across the entire supply chain. We also introduce an open-access tool for datacenter carbon footprint analysis called CarbonMeter. Our results show that the European datacenters analyzed in our study can emit up to 2 megatons of greenhouse gases over their lifetime, consume 56 billion liters of water, and have minimal current potential for circularity given that less than 1% of these impacts can be addressed through recycling. We show that the overall environmental impact of datacenters remains concentrated in the operational stage of their lifecycle, accounting for 65% to 91% of the overall carbon footprint of a datacenter. We also find that the manufacturing footprint is especially a significant contributor to the overall footprint in countries that utilize renewable energy sources, accounting for up to 35% of the overall carbon footprint.

In the context of increasing global warming, alternative climate intervention strategies are gaining prominence in policy, scientific, media, and public discourse. This study provides novel insights into public perceptions of these interventions, and the foreseeable changes for the near future, through a global foresight exercise involving 44 focus groups across 22 countries, evenly divided between the Global North (e.g. Australia, Germany, United States) and the Global South (e.g., Brazil, India, South Africa). Engaging 323 participants, the study explored imagined futures where climate interventions—such as solar radiation modification and large-scale carbon removal—are widely implemented in 2030. The participants generated 299 distinct futures, each characterized by an imagined newspaper headline, key actor(s), events and specific outcomes. In this paper, these futures are analyzed across the dimensions of technology, societal impact, actor networks, and in terms of spatial and scalar considerations. The findings reveal an extraordinary diversity of futures, ranging from optimistic futures of technological innovation and disease eradication to pessimistic futures of ecological disruption, the spread of cancer, and social inequities. This study underscores the plurality of perspectives on climate intervention futures, reflecting the interplay of cultural, geopolitical, and technological factors. By illuminating the breadth of futures, these findings provide timely insights to inform the development of inclusive, culturally sensitive climate policies at a critical juncture in the global response to climate change.

Biodiversity loss and deforestation are increasingly recognized as systemic economic risks. Yet, their implications for financial markets remain poorly understood. Here we study how biodiversity and ecosystem service loss affect financial risk for the world’s largest asset class, sovereign debt. Environmental degradation undermines the natural foundations of economic activity, reducing productive capacity and the ability of governments to service debt. Currently, sovereign credit ratings ignore these risks, meaning that markets may be mispricing, mismanaging and misallocating US$83 trillion of financial assets. We incorporate biodiversity risk into sovereign credit assessments by extending S&P Global’s methodology to include scenarios for future tropical timber, wild pollination and marine fisheries services across 23 countries, representing 5.5 billion people. A partial ecosystem collapse scenario increases annual debt servicing costs by US$49 billion in India, equivalent to 2.4% of median post-tax income, and by US$70 billion in China. Across countries, additional annual interest payments could reach US$162 billion, nearly reaching the US$200 billion per year target for conservation support under the Global Biodiversity Framework. Angola, Bangladesh, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Madagascar could face gross domestic product losses of more than 15% by 2030. Our results suggest that financial markets are systematically underpricing nature-related risks, with consequences for public finances, nature and financial stability.

As both direct and embodied carbon emissions of data centers is expected to increase in coming years, estimating data center carbon footprints has become essential to understand and address the sustainability challenges. Due to the lack of publicly available data regarding data center operations and infrastructure, there is a need for tools that can provide carbon emission estimations with a minimal amount of data. To address this challenge, we present our open-source tool, CarbonMeter, which allows users to quickly generate carbon footprint estimates for a given data center, using only data center area and data center power capacity information. CarbonMeter allows users to easily adjust parameters that affect carbon emissions and provides a breakdown of operational and embodied footprint. Furthermore, CarbonMeter enables swift evaluation of workload migration strategies to optimize electricity costs, carbon emissions and renewable curtailment by using real-time signals in the Nordic region. We evaluate the benefits of workload migration decisions by CarbonMeter on multiple case studies encompassing data centers located in Norway, Denmark, and Germany. Our results show 6% to 21% electricity cost reductions, while reducing the carbon emissions up to 49%.

Acceleration has multiple implicit meanings in the emerging literatures on sustainability transitions, systems transformation, and science and technology studies, among other disciplines. But how has acceleration been conceptualised in social sciences literatures analysing transitions towards sustainability? Are there potential synergies across these literatures that can advance our understanding of acceleration? In this paper we take stock of existing knowledge and propose a new conceptual understanding of this increasingly crucial phenomenon based on a systematic and critical literature review consisting of 171 published studies. In doing so, we both map the field and critically interrogate its contributions. The review harnesses insights from both the socio-technical system transitions and broader social science literatures to capture how the different disciplines research the acceleration of transitions towards sustainability. We classify different perspectives that envision acceleration as a phenomenon, a purpose, a process, and a multi-faceted concept. We conclude by presenting a novel conceptual typology of acceleration for sustainability transitions.

Collective climate action hinges on the distribution of benefits and burdens of climate change mitigation. Yet assumptions relevant to distributional justice are frequently made only implicitly in climate change mitigation scenarios. Here, we introduce the patterns of the distributional justice framework that operationalize philosophical justice theories as quantitative requirements for scenario trajectories. We then apply this framework to the IPCC AR6 scenario database to assess the distributional implications of global climate change mitigation scenarios across world regions. Focusing on scenario variables related to energy and meat consumption, we found a diversity of patterns of justice across scenario characteristics. The prioritarian perspective, which prioritizes improvements to those currently worse off, emerged as the most dominant pattern of justice. By contrast, futures with limited or reduced energy and meat consumption were the least represented in the database. Our research further indicates that most scenarios consistent with patterns of justice do not explicitly aim to model more just futures, suggesting that underlying scenario narratives—most often SSP2—largely determine the distributional outcomes. We therefore propose a stakeholder engagement strategy to make distributional justice assumptions in scenario development ex-ante more diverse and transparent. Overall, this study provides a practical avenue for developing justice-conscious scenarios that may be more likely to motivate collective climate action.

Alaska, the largest geographic state in the United States, experiences climate change and global warming two to three times that of the global average, leading to thawing permafrost, wildfires, and more severe storms. However, managing climate interventions in Alaska is riddled with challenges that threaten to create risk–risk tradeoffs. Based on semi-structured expert interviews (N = 24), site visits in Alaska (N = 3), and photography, including within one Indigenous group in the Arctic Circle, this study investigates the concept of risk–risk tradeoffs involved in Arctic climate interventions. It does so by examining two case studies: one of a $360 million plan for coastal protection and adaptation via seawalls, revetments, and beach nourishment in Utqiagvik (formerly Barrow), as well as another case study of plans to expand the management of Alaskan boreal forests across the Tanana Valley and Matanuska-Susitna Valley to provide about $50 million worth of carbon removal services. The study explores how climate protection interventions have a target risk to be mitigated—such as flooding, storm surge, coastal erosion, accelerated global warming—but also involve adverse or countervailing risks such as permafrost thawing, sea level rise, inward human migration, wildfires, invasive species, and insect outbreaks. The study then discusses implications of these results in terms of differential risk dynamics, intersecting risks, and uncertainty. In doing so, it reveals a recurring and capricious challenge in terms of climate policy, climate protection, and risk management. It highlights creative adaptation of local policy instruments to combat climate change, and illustrates the value of engagement with non-governmental entities to fortify policy measures.

This Review examines the role of carbon capture and storage (CCS) in achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, focusing on its scale-up and integration across energy systems and hard-to-abate industries. Its interdisciplinary approach provides a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art in CCS research, evaluating its potential role in achieving net-zero emissions. It assesses not only technological advancements and characteristics but also the critical costs and energy requirements of various CCS technologies. Based on modelling insights from the International Energy Agency Net Zero Emissions pathway, it highlights the need to scale CCS deployment to 1 Gt CO₂ annually by 2030 to stay on track for climate goals. This review piece underscores the urgency of rapid CCS scale-up this decade, complementing other measures across energy and industry. Furthermore, it assesses the recent advancements in CO₂ capture, transport, and storage technologies, along with their techno-economic characteristics and results in energy system models. The study concludes by identifying key challenges and providing a strategy roadmap for decision-makers for accelerating CCS deployment.

The United States was the world's third-largest donor of climate change aid and the largest donor of foreign aid prior to 2025. As a major carbon emitter and donor, the U.S. has long been central to international climate change initiatives. However, details about U.S. climate aid are scattered and often difficult to interpret. This paper explores how the U.S. federal government structures its overseas climate change aid through a descriptive and thematic analysis of stated aims and objectives of 117 projects funded over a 25-year period (2000-2024), focusing on climate change adaptation. Using official government data, it investigates which forms and types of climate adaptation receive support, particularly in such areas as drought resilience, coastal protection, early warning systems, and climate-resilient agriculture, as well as the countries and institutions which are the main recipients of U.S. climate-related assistance. The analysis considers a range of adaptation-related interventions - from mangrove regeneration and erosion control to climate-resilient irrigation and glacial flood prevention. It goes beyond analysing only budgets, donors and implementation partners to evaluate project objectives and approaches, as well as the four thematic areas of gender, equity and justice, education, and displacement. By examining these themes, the study aims to provide a comprehensive overview of U.S. climate aid priorities and the evolving architecture of its international climate finance. It offers a descriptive thematic mapping of the stated aims, adaptation types, and cross-cutting priorities of 117 well-documented U.S. government-funded adaptation projects identified through official government data.

Invisible minorities, including some Indigenous groups, face an almost constant struggle against exclusion, restricted access to services and patterns of institutional racism against them, and inequities in democratic participation and representation. This research examines how one such community, the Irish Travellers, understand and experience an absence of energy justice, including lack of access to clean renewable energy. Drawing from 38 household interviews and community site visits, our study reveals persistent patterns of energy poverty-households reported 40-60% of monthly expenditures on energy services-and exclusion from decision-making processes, revealing failures in both procedural and distributive justice. We document that discriminatory and segregation practices against Irish Travellers have contributed to the erosion of Travellers' cultural practices and customs. Our findings underscore how spatial injustices have led to "unjust geographies" that limit Travellers' opportunities to engage in, and benefit from, just energy transitions. By capturing the lived experiences of Irish Travellers, our study helps broaden how energy justice is understood, conceptualised and lived among an invisible minority. To achieve a full just transition, we must recognise the experiences and epistemologies of invisible minorities in the broader energy agenda.

|The recent and rapid expansion of artificial intelligence (AI), data centers, and other digitalization technologies has accelerated global electricity consumption, creating a new paradigm in energy and growth. Still, no comprehensive framework exists to evaluate the role of low-carbon innovations across AI's complex sociotechnical ecosystem. This review addresses three questions: What low- and zero-carbon technologies can help mitigate the energy and carbon footprint of AI and digitalization? What barriers prevent their adoption? Which policy interventions can overcome these barriers? Using a sociotechnical systems approach, we conducted a systematic literature search and screened 364 articles published from 2000 to 2025 to analyze impacts and opportunities across four critical dimensions of AI, data centers, and digitalization provisioning: natural resources, facilities and components, applications, and users and institutions. We identify over 70 mitigation technologies, with reported energy reductions ranging from 13% to 94% across individual studies, alongside projections in high-growth scenarios where data center electricity demand could grow by 13-15% per year to 2030. Three barrier categories emerged: technological constraints, institutional and political limitations, and behavioral resistance. Policy measures such as carbon pricing and mandatory energy reporting, and operational strategies, such as geographic load balancing, are frequently highlighted as high-leverage options for overcoming these barriers. This holistic STS framework provides a foundation for future interdisciplinary research and policy development, identifying critical research gaps including demand forecasting, Global South equity, and organizational change.

Driven by climate and energy policy priorities in national and global contexts, coal phase-out is expected to improve public health outcomes by reducing human exposure to air, water, and soil pollution and decreasing the number of workers in dangerous mining conditions. However, the transition may also increase economic distress in mining communities leading to poorer health outcomes—possibly offsetting the benefits of phasing out coal. We examine this hypothesis by assessing the relation between coal production, working hours per miner, coal mining employment, and life expectancy in 3076 U.S. counties (97.9% of all U.S. counties) from 2012 to 2019. We develop and apply a novel spatial modeling approach that combines the high-dimensional half-panel jackknife fixed effects estimator with the spatial lag of X model and examine whether increases and decreases in each predictor are associated with life expectancy. We find that an increase in coal mining employment in adjacent counties increases life expectancy in the focal county in the short and long run and vice versa for a decrease in employment, and that decreases in miner labor hours in adjacent counties increase life expectancy in the short and long run in the focal county. We also find that effects differ in Appalachia compared to the rest of the country—where increases in coal production are associated with decreases in life expectancy and is also where the effects of coal mining employment are concentrated. These findings suggest that both increasing and decreasing reliance on coal can negatively impact population health, and that these competing exposures underscore the importance of a Just Transition away from fossil fuels.

Interventions to mitigate and adapt to extreme heat are becoming increasingly necessary at the local scale to contend with the negative health and energy security implications of rising temperatures caused by climate change, the urban heat island effect and urbanization. Interventions across fields have yet to be harmonized, nor have interstitial risks, benefits and implementation challenges been consistently investigated. This study develops a typology of cooling interventions to address extreme heat: lowering temperature, altering buildings, changing behavior, and decarbonizing energy and material systems. The typology is based on a review of relevant literature covering microclimatology, sustainable buildings, behavioral science and energy systems decarbonization. We develop a categorization of interventions which address increasing temperatures through a mix of climate mitigation, infrastructural resilience, climate adaptation and geoengineering approaches. Increasing temperatures has complex and multi-disciplinary impacts, and the cooling interventions must be intentionally chosen to match this problem with equal nuance, rigor, and efficacy.

How can we comprehend China's net-zero transition approach when distinct theoretical frameworks offer differing explanations? Drawn from extensive original field research and 52 semi-structured interviews with experts on China, we apply a meta-theoretical approach that first describes three complementary frameworks (Geographies of Energy Transition, Variegated Capitalism, and Fragmented Authoritarianism) to interpret China's net-zero transition under the dual “30–60” targets of peaking emissions by 2030 and reaching carbon neutrality by 2060. The Geographies of Energy Transition approach reveals the spatial differentiation, path dependence, and regional unevenness embedded in China's net-zero transition. Variegated Capitalism highlights a state-led logic of “managed competition”, in which state-owned enterprises, party authority, and relational (guanxi) networks enable multi-level policy coordination and technological mobilization. Meanwhile, Fragmented Authoritarianism underscores the coexistence of centralization and decentralization within China's administrative state, illustrating the misalignments, negotiations, and experimental practices that characterize policy implementation. After describing each of these theories, we discuss and demonstrate how framework pluralism reveals insights unavailable to single-perspective analysis; empirically, we provide evidence across multiple domains and sectors; methodologically, we show that net-zero transitions are multi-dimensional phenomena that defy any singular framework attempting to explain China's transitions. Although we do not offer a synthesis of these theories, bringing together different perspectives demonstrates that net-zero transitions are neither teleological, in the sense of operating according to a fixed internal logic and timetable, nor unitary processes. Instead, they are marked by political ruptures, multi-scalar interactions and contestations, unanticipated technological dynamics, and very distinct ideological underpinnings.

A consensus is emerging that carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is indispensable for achieving net-zero targets and managing hard-to-abate greenhouse gas emissions. However, many modeling and quantitative studies fail to represent the complex sociotechnical landscape of CDR, often limiting their scope to a few technological options and providing an incomplete analysis of the trade-offs between deployment benefits and risks. This study addresses this gap through a qualitative, expert-driven assessment of the most significant benefits and risks facing CDR deployment across three Global North (Italy, Norway, and the United Kingdom) and three Global South (Brazil, Malaysia, and Saudi Arabia) contexts. Methodologically, the study derives its insights from an original data set of N = 98 semistructured interviews with a diverse range of CDR experts from academia, government, civil society, and the private sector. The analysis identifies 12 economic, political, ecological, and social benefits alongside 12 corresponding risks, revealing critical context-specific synergies and tensions that must be navigated for ensuring the equitable and sustainable deployment of CDR.

As the building sector seeks to decarbonize by 2050, advocates and analysts must weigh potential risks of new technological adoptions to avoid negative impacts on communities and ecosystems. This study investigates how building professionals perceive the risks of decarbonizing the building sector, drawing on mixed-method analysis of interviews and survey data from 60 experienced practitioners across two United States cities. Financial loss was the most prominent perceived risk using a post-interview survey, followed by increasing technical-complexity concerns, shortage of low-carbon materials and higher costs of energy and maintenance among others. Energy cost concerns were reflected in potential grid strain and justice concerns of tenant unaffordability. Perceptions of risk salience vary by subgroup of profession, experience, and location. We recommend integrated planning and utilization of multi-faceted risk assessment frameworks to ensure equitable risk evaluation in sectoral decarbonization.