With the increasing popularity of teleworking after the Covid-19 pandemic and the urgent threat of climate change, there is growing interest in its potential to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from transport. While some studies have explored the environmental benefits of teleworking, most fail to address the significant uncertainty associated with it. Few of these studies have applied sophisticated mathematical methods to explore how we can maximize the environmental benefits of teleworking, and even fewer have considered the distributions of input variables. Our study aims to fill these gaps based on historical data observations.This study employs simulation, global sensitivity analysis and scenario analysis methods to address the uncertainty and identify the most important variables affecting teleworkers' transport emissions. The study analyzes travel diaries from over 100,000 individuals in the English National Travel Survey (NTS) from 2002 to 2023. Our findings reveal that minimizing trip distance and reducing non-work trips, along with optimizing business travel, can lead to substantial emission reductions among teleworkers. Additionally, the decline in private car use contributes to emission reduction. Notably, the emission gap between teleworkers and non-teleworkers is larger for those living outside London.

Researchers often study the twin global transitions of decarbonization and digitalization separately. Analysts frequently assume that digitalization will lead to energy-demand reduction, thereby assisting decarbonization. However, research suggests this will not happen on its own, with direct energy demand from information and communication technologies (ICTs) growing rapidly and broader impacts unclear. We suggest various possible digitalization pathways, with different impacts on energy demand, societal well-being, and other sustainability indicators. In this article, we focus on tensions between techno-economic pathways and socio-technical pathways. We consider what sustainable digitalization might look like for society, users, business, technology, and policy, drawing on the concepts of responsible digitalization and digital sufficiency. This article then considers three policy areas as illustrative examples for finding sustainable digitalization pathways: data use and data protection, devices and home-energy use, and alternative transport solutions. We follow this up with a discussion on policy principles for sustainable digitalization that considers regulation for value and accountability, protection of users and consumers, adopting a systems approach, and the need for directionality and leadership.

Energy demand reduction options can make an important contribution to a Net Zero transition for climate change mitigation, and also offer multiple social, economic, and environmental 'co-benefits'. However, these cobenefits are often insufficiently accounted for in policy making, which tends to focus on direct economic costs and benefits. Applying Multi Criteria Mapping and survey methods, the paper investigates how citizens in two UK regions value a range of energy demand reduction options in relation to indicators of wellbeing. This analysis shows that citizens place high value on a range of co-benefits of energy demand reduction options, whilst also valuing fairness including environmental intergenerational concerns and accepting the need for some restrictions on individuals' lifestyle choices. This provides support for recent analysis, based on evaluation of expert opinion, that demand-side mitigation measures are consistent with high levels of citizens' wellbeing, and suggests that energy policy assessment needs to take these co-benefits into account in decision-making processes. This is consistent with moving towards a wider 'wellbeing economy' approach, compared to a narrower assessment based only on economic costs and benefits.

Despite decades of research on the environmental impacts of teleworking, most studies have neglected building-related energy use and emissions. Even fewer studies have explored the relative influence of dif-ferent variables on those emissions. This study therefore explores the building-related emissions from teleworking in England using data from the UK Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) database over the period 2008 to 2022. We use a building energy model to estimate the additional emissions associated with different patterns of teleworking, including variations in heated area and internal temperature. We combine our results with a separate set of estimates of the transport-related emissions. We also employ global sensitivity analysis to identify the relative importance of different variables.We find that English teleworkers have significantly higher emissions than non-teleworkers. Considering both transport and domestic building emissions, working from home 3-5 days/week leads to 3% less to 17% more carbon emissions than conventional work patterns depending on the heating area, heating system heating time and required temperature. We find that heating area has the biggest influ-ence on building emissions, followed by the number of heating hours, wall insulation and the efficiency performance and carbon intensity of the heating system.(c) 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Innovations and efficiencies in digital technology have lately been depicted as paramount in the green transition to enable the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, both in the information and communication technology (ICT) sector and the wider economy. This, however, fails to adequately account for rebound effects that can offset emission savings and, in the worst case, increase emissions. In this perspective, we draw on a transdisciplinary workshop with 19 experts from carbon accounting, digital sustainability research, ethics, sociology, public policy, and sustainable business to expose the challenges of addressing rebound effects in digital innovation processes and associated policy. We utilize a responsible innovation approach to uncover potential ways forward for incorporating rebound effects in these domains, concluding that addressing ICT-related rebound effects ultimately requires a shift from an ICT efficiency-centered perspective to a "systems thinking" model, which aims to understand efficiency as one solution among others that requires constraints on emissions for ICT environmental savings to be realized.

This paper provides a detailed review of the basis and prospects for United Kingdom (UK) proposals for the most ambitious mainstream social, economic, and environmental policy program of the 21st century: the Green New Deal (GND), providing critical reflection for its implementation at a local or regional level. Through a review of academic, policy and book publications we examine the key proposed features of a UK GND, identifying five core elements: financial reforms; green infrastructure investment; financing the GND; ownership structures; and economic, social and climate justice. We subsequently review these policy areas through the lens of multi-level governance (MLG) to understand what scales of policy action are required for these aims to be achieved. We find that, whilst core elements of a UK GND, such as reforms to the financial system, and expansionary fiscal and monetary policy require policy change at national and supra-national level, the majority of GND investments require implementation at the local level. We suggest that, in the context of contemporary UK MLG, there are challenges for fully funding and delivering a GND without a national programme, while highlighting emerging options for coordinating and implementing a GND by local government actors, in the absence of national support.

Community Wealth Building (CWB) is a burgeoning international policy agenda for local economic development that seeks to enhance democratic ownership, retain the benefits of local economic activity and empower place-based economies and workers. Parallel to this, in the context of net zero transitions, there has been increasing interest in approaches to enhancing civil society and community ownership over local energy provision. However, in academic and practitioner debates, there has been very little interaction between these two strands of thinking and action on the need for radical change in current energy provision, particularly as part of a wider transformative change away from dominant neoliberal economic thinking, policies and structures. In this Perspective, we explore the various ways in which synergies exist between CWB and energy transitions by considering two civil society approaches to transitions; namely, the Thousand Flowers transition pathway and research in Grassroots Innovations. We examine how community energy could be strengthened through CWB, by showing how the ideas within these two approaches respond to the five core principles of CWB. Promising future directions for research and practice are identified, including linking up CWB and just transitions strategies, a renewed focus on local financial innovation and the growing role of anchor institutions in supporting net zero transitions, particularly where CWB supports economic democracy transformations in new net zero economies.

This paper develops the use of the branching point concept as a tool to support key decisions for reorienting systems for sustainability and applies this to the case of alternative pathways for heat decarbonisation in the UK. In this approach, a pathway is seen as arising from accumulation of many specific decisions which create momentum in a particular direction and so reinforce the irreversibility of the pathway. Branching points are key decision-points connected to pathways of system development, they "determine whether and in what ways the pathway is followed" [1]. However branching points are not pre-defined forks in the road, and in uncertain and complex settings, recognising and shaping potential branching points may be part of supporting and enabling transitions to sustainability. This paper demonstrates the potential to develop branching point analysis into a tool to support and help structure policy decisions for transition. A three-step process to analyse connections between transition pathways is proposed and applied to a case study of UK heat decarbonisation: a transition-in-progress. Step 1: identifying relevant socio-technical pathways and their system and development characteristics; Step 2 mapping potential connection points between pathways; Step 3 unpacking these as spaces of co-ordination and competition between the pathways. This analysis highlights and responds to a gap between a policy approach framed by a sector-wide target and the development of distinct socio-technical responses. This research develops a strategic policy approach, for supporting developments for decarbonisation focused on potential connection points between pathways of development.

This research uses a participatory method to develop exploratory future energy scenarios for an ecological intentional community in the north of Scotland, Findhorn Ecovillage. These futures serve several purposes: They can be used as decision support by the community, provide insights about the challenges for further decarbonisation in places where the environmental impact from activities has already been reduced, and insights into the implications for meeting the net zero emissions target for the UK on a community spatial scale. The energy futures for Findhorn Ecovillage were based on discussions at a facilitated online stakeholder workshop. The participants were led through a series of steps to create a 2 x 2 matrix based on democratically selected drivers for change, and in developing a pathway through time for each of the resulting four scenarios. The exploratory futures method adopted also enabled participants to consider interactions with wider society including central and devolved government, the wider economy, and the environment. The findings highlight that while intentional communities are to some degree withdrawn from the mainstream, they are embedded within and depend upon the wider society and economy. This could inhibit or accelerate further decarbonisation and could present a risk of undermining the community's lifestyle principles.

The energy efficiency and consumption of mobile networks have received increasing attention from academics and industry in recent years. This has been provoked by rapid increases in mobile data traffic and projected further rapid increases over the next decade. As a result, dramatic improvements in the energy efficiency of mobile networks are required to ensure that future traffic levels are both environmentally and economically sustainable. In this context, a good deal of research has focused on technologies and strategies that can improve the energy efficiency of 5G and future mobile networks more broadly. However, existing reviews in the field of green or sustainable mobile communications on the topic of the energy use implications of 5G overlook a number of issues that broader literatures on the energy use impacts of ICTs suggest could be significant. Addressing this gap, we conduct a literature review to examine whole network level assessments of the operational energy use implications of 5G, the embodied energy use associated with 5G, and indirect effects associated with 5G-driven changes in user behaviour and patterns of consumption and production in other sectors of the economy. In general, we find that these issues and their energy use implications have received insufficient attention in publicly available studies on the energy use impacts of 5G.

Futures studies can fulfil a variety of purposes; for informing policy, developing investment or business strategies, and changing perceptions of what the future may hold. Futures can therefore be described as having transformative potential. This paper uses a participatory scenario approach to develop regional energy futures for a U.K. case study in the North of Tyne region. Two sets of futures are developed; pre-pandemic, and during the pandemic. This was for insights into the challenges for developing subnational scale futures, and how futures thinking may have been impacted by the pandemic. The North of Tyne energy future scenarios are based on discussions in two facilitated stakeholder workshops, pre and during the pandemic. It was found that the pandemic had resulted in shifts in practices and behaviours such as increased home working, and an appreciation of local environments and communities. However, there were commonalities too. In both settings, decarbonisation was a strong driver for change in the energy system, as was the need for fairness in the transition. There were barriers in futures thinking that had to be overcome, most notably was the presumption that meeting the net zero target was a certainty. This presented difficulties in imagining futures that didn’t achieve this target or did so but more slowly. The importance of being able to imagine living in all kinds of future worlds will be critical in a system undergoing such profound change so that strategic foresight is developed to minimise risks of missing the net zero target.

In order to avoid environmental catastrophe we need to move to a post-growth economy that can deliver rapid reductions in environmental impacts and improve well-being, independent of GDP growth. Such a move will entail considerable structural change in the economy, implying different goals and strategies for different economic sectors. So far there are no systematic approaches for identifying the desired shape of structural change and sectoral goals in terms of output, demand and employment. We present a novel analysis that addresses this gap by classifying economic sectors into groups with similar structural change goals. Our framework for the classification considers sectoral characteristics along three dimensions, which are (a) the final energy intensity, (b) the potential and desirability for labour productivity growth and (c) the relationship between labour productivity and the energy-labour ratio. We present empirical evidence on the three framework dimensions for economic sectors in the UK and Germany and derive structural change goals for the four sector groups representing particular combinations of the sector characteristics. Our analysis allows us to discuss the specific role of different economic sectors in the structural change envisioned in the post-growth transition and the most important challenges they might be facing.

The sharing economy is changing the consumption and ownership of goods. As consumption becomes more and more characterised by sharing and access-based consumption, ownership is becoming more concentrated. The literature on the sharing economy focuses almost exclusively on shared consumption practices and rather overlooks the question of ownership despite a substantial body of work on forms of shared ownership, that is, fractional ownership. In this paper, I study the extent of the linking between these two streams of work and whether they have a common conceptual base. I analyse the citations networks of these academic literatures, using the Leiden algorithm of community detection and main-path analysis. I find that the sharing economy literature originated in consumer research that debates over sharing as opposed to possession, and in work on transaction costs. I draw on the strand of work on fractional ownership and identify three sharing economy aspects: psychological ownership, anticommons and exclusion of group cooperation. The findings allow a better understanding of the characteristics of the sharing economy and open avenues for future research on fractional ownership models in the sharing economy.

To date, the literature on the circular economy has been dominated by closed-loop industrial practices, circular products, and business models. Lack of systemic perspective in the circularity debate limited the understanding of multi-actor and multi-pattern transitions. In this paper, we apply a co-evolutionary framework to investigate key dimensions of a socio-technical system -ecosystems, technologies, businesses, institutions, and user practices-in the city of Brighton and Hove (United Kingdom). We present the causal interaction between these systems based on the outcomes of semi-structured interviews with the local actors and documentary analysis of relevant policies and strategies. Exploring how each system evolves under own dynamics and influenced by the dynamics in the others leads us to identify the main drivers and barriers of a circular economy in the city. Our findings underline the necessity of systems-level change with a holistic vision, consideration of place-specific factors and engagement of multiple actors for a successful transition.

This paper aims to provide a deeper understanding of the different types of innovations in digital energy services business models in the UK, and examine how they create and capture social and economic values, to users and the energy system. Business model innovations are represented in an Innovation Ladder to aid understanding of what social and environmental values they create and capture. Using a co-evolutionary framework, the paper unpacks the way technology, users, institutions, business strategies and ecosystems underpin the characteristics of business models at each level of the Innovation Ladder and examines the role of collective action and institutional density in negotiating the values created and captured for users and the energy system. The paper uncovers two important value gaps, which question the ability of digital energy service business models to deliver more social and environmental value. The higher up business models are in the Innovation Ladder, the more value they create for the energy system but fewer benefits for users. The higher up business models are in the Innovation Ladder, the more abstract and limited the articulation of social and environmental values, exposing a weak link between digital innovations and the social and environmental values created and captured. Addressing these value gaps could contribute to achieving a successful transition to a net zero carbon energy system. This paper aims to provide a deeper understanding of the different types of innovations in digital energy services business models in the UK, and examine how they create and capture social and economic values, to users and the energy system. Business model innovations are represented in an Innovation Ladder to aid understanding of what social and environmental values they create and capture. Using a co-evolutionary framework, the paper unpacks the way technology, users, institutions, business strategies and ecosystems underpin the characteristics of business models at each level of the Innovation Ladder and examines the role of collective action and institutional density in negotiating the values created and captured for users and the energy system. The paper uncovers two important value gaps, which question the ability of digital energy service business models to deliver more social and environmental value. The higher up business models are in the Innovation Ladder, the more value they create for the energy system but fewer benefits for users. The higher up business models are in the Innovation Ladder, the more abstract and limited the articulation of social and environmental values, exposing a weak link between digital innovations and the social and environmental values created and captured. Addressing these value gaps could contribute to achieving a successful transition to a net zero carbon energy system.

This paper develops the use of the branching point concept as a tool to support key decisions for reorienting systems for sustainability. In this approach, a pathway is seen as arising from accumulation of many specific decisions which create momentum in a particular direction and so reinforce the irreversibility of the pathway. Three complementary approaches to branching point analysis are identified within the transitions literature: 1) in pathway-scenarios for sustainability, 2) framing key decision-points in historical analysis, 3) to deconstruct the politics of transition pathways. A case study of UK heat decarbonisation is used to apply the branching point concept. This analysis highlights the tension where a policy approach, framed by a sector-wide target, interacts with distinct socio-technical responses and an alternative policy approach to decision-points is proposed. This paper demonstrates the potential to develop branching point analysis into a tool to support and help structure policy decisions for transition.