• Energy Research
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The social confinement resulting from the COVID-19 crisis temporarily reduced greenhouse gas emissions. Although experts contend that the decrease in pollution rates was not drastic, some surveys detect growth in social concern about the climate. In this new climate-conscious environment, municipalities and local governments are promoting a new way of living and caring for cities, even before they can regain national and international freedom of movement. This work analyzes the connections between new climate awareness arising from the COVID-19 crisis, proposals of sustainable citizenship around the world, and its communication on Twitter to educate the new eco-conscious audience. The methodology mixes quantitative and qualitative analysis, using the Twitonomy Premium tool and the Twitter research tool with data extracted at the end of December 2020. Among the top ten most influential and active accounts, the results show educational institutions, local institutions, companies, neighborhoods, associations, and influencers. The impossibility of living in the city has not prevented citizen education and commitment to make real change for when that city and its citizens return to normality. However, this new normality must be different: more ecological, more responsible, more sustainable, and practiced from early childhood.

The outbreak of SARS-COV-2 disease 2019 (COVID-19) abruptly changed the patterns in electricity consumption, challenging the system operations of forecasting and balancing supply and demand. This is due to the mitigation measures that include lockdown and Work from Home (WFH), which decreased the aggregated demand and remarkably altered its profile. Here, we characterise these changes with various quantitative markers and compare it with pre-COVID-19 business-as-usual data using Great Britain (GB) as a case study. The ripple effects on the generation portfolio, system frequency, forecasting accuracy and imbalance pricing are also analysed. An energy data extraction and pre-processing pipeline that can be used in a variety of similar studies is also presented. Analysis of the GB demand data during the March 2020 lockdown indicates that a shift to WFH will result to a net benefit for flexible stakeholders, such as consumer on variable tariffs. Furthermore, the analysis illustrates a need for faster and more frequent balancing actions, as a result of the increased share of renewable energy in the generation mix. This new equilibrium of energy demand and supply will require a redesign of the existing balancing mechanisms as well as the longer-term power system planning strategies.

Humans have always lived in eras of more or less obvious crises and risks. When Ulrich Beck wrote about the risk society in 1986, he talked about risks as invisibility lacking spatial and temporal boundaries. The environmental risks of the modern society may often appear diffuse, even if, for example, the climate change dilemma has progressively become noticeable. However, this year, people on Earth have had to face a most obvious risk. The effects of Covid-19 have reached such proportions that the human world probably will never be the same again. However, the extent of jeopardies is not similar for all world inhabitants, neither are the tools to handle the risks. To face the threat and learn from it, humans need to change manners on many levels and in many social and physical areas. Some of the main questions to reflect on and discuss in this feature issue of Sustainability are: What will the most urgent role of sustainability education be now and in the future? What kind of teaching, learning and educational policies are most relevant? What issues are most crucial in sustainability education research?

Although Cultural Heritage is a recognized source of well‑being, its touristic overexploitation gen‑ erates strong negative impacts, aggravated in large cities due to the concentration of effects in space. This work addresses the case of Madrid, a city that has first‑rate heritage assets in its metropolitan periphery, whose better touristic use would help to mitigate the negative impact on the capital, while contributing to the economic and social development of the periphery. In the research, a dynamic methodological approach was applied with four complementary analysis planes: documentary and networks, qualitative, quantitative and participatory processes. The results show the need to adopt cultural management and tourism planning strategies aimed at rebalancing visitor flows. The activation of the neighbors themselves is revealed as an especially valuable resource to strengthen proximity, experiential and more sustainable tourism. The The impact of Covid‑19, on the one hand, and the declaration of Paseo del Prado and El Retiro as World Heritage Sites, on the other, have made this situation even more topical.

This study empirically investigates the complex interplay between the severity of the coronavirus pandemic, mobility changes in retail and recreation, transit stations, workplaces, and residential areas, and lockdown measures in 88 countries of the word. To conduct the study, data on mobility patterns, socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of people, lockdown measures, and coronavirus pandemic were collected from multiple sources (e.g., Google, UNDP, UN, BBC, Oxford University, Worldometer). A Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) technique is used to investigate the direct and indirect effects of independent variables on dependent variables considering the intervening effects of mediators. Results show that lockdown measures have significant effects to encourage people to maintain social distancing. However, pandemic severity and socioeconomic and institutional factors have limited effects to sustain social distancing practice. The results also explain that socioeconomic and institutional factors of urbanity and modernity have significant effects on pandemic severity. Countries with a higher number of elderly people, employment in the service sector, and higher globalization trend are the worst victims of the coronavirus pandemic (e.g., USA, UK, Italy, and Spain). Social distancing measures are reasonably effective at tempering the severity of the pandemic.

The global COVID-19 pandemic is a health crisis, an economic crisis, and a justice crisis. It also brings to light multiple ongoing, underlying social crises. The COVID-19 crisis is actively revealing crises of energy sovereignty in at least four ways. First, there are many whose access to basic health services is compromised because of the lack of energy services necessary to provide these services. Second, some people are more vulnerable to COVID-19 because of exposure to environmental pollution associated with energy production. Third, energy services are vital to human wellbeing, yet access to energy services is largely organized as a consumer good. The loss of stable income precipitated by COVID-19 may therefore mean that many lose reliable access to essential energy services. Fourth, the COVID-19 crisis has created a window of opportunity for corporate interests to engage in aggressive pursuit of energy agendas that perpetuate carbon intensive and corporate controlled energy systems, which illuminates the ongoing procedural injustices of energy decision making. These four related crises demonstrate why energy sovereignty is essential for a just energy future. Energy sovereignty is defined as the right for communities, rather than corporate interests, to control access to and decision making regarding the sources, scales, and forms of ownership characterizing access to energy services. Energy sovereignty is a critical component in the design of a post-COVID-19 energy system that is capable of being resilient to future shocks without exacerbating injustices that are killing the most vulnerable among us.

The energy sector faces many challenges today, in particular from the current health (COVID-19) and resulting financial crises. However, a significant number of challenges existed prior to the outb...