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Organic photovoltaics (OPV) have developed into a vast research area. Progress in various directions has made it difficult to monitor the technology's precise development state. We offer a patent landscape analysis over all OPV devices, their substrates and encapsulation materials to provide an overview of patenting activity from a historical, organizational, geographical and technological point of view. Such an exercise is instrumental for private companies and research institutes aiming at both internal or external technology creation. We discuss our findings in the context of the Industrial Life Cycle model and find OPV still residing in the fluid technology development phase. Technology development is still following an exponential growth path, with the majority of patents coming from the Asian continent and in general private companies. For devices, the main technological focus can be traced back to the " H01L-031" international patent classification (IPC) main group. For the queried substrates, the most attention has gone to glass, but paper and textile have drawn significant interest too. Finally, encapsulation is found to be a less mature research field given the smaller number of patent families. The latter shows that the technology has not matured to the level where processing is carried out on a commercial scale

Abstract In this study, we investigate the driving forces behind the changes in residential energy consumption (REC) in China’s urban and rural areas over the 2001–2012 period. Based on the logarithmic mean Divisia index method, the REC changes are decomposed into seven driving forces, which are climate change, energy price, energy expenditure mix, energy cost share (in total expenditure), expenditure share (in income), per capita income and population effects. According to the results, climate effect due to increasing days with abnormal temperature, energy cost share effect characterized by more expenditure to be paid for energy use, income effect describing constant income growth in the residential sector definitely increase REC in both urban and rural areas. In contrast, energy prices and energy expenditure mix effects negatively contribute to the REC increase, respectively because of the increase in energy prices and the transition from the low-priced energy to high-priced energy. Expenditure share and population effects play opposite roles in urban and rural areas, and the reasons and implications are analysed in depth.

Current economic instruments aimed at climate change mitigation focus mainly on CO(2) emissions, but efficient climate mitigation needs to focus on other greenhouse gases as well as CO(2). This study investigates the distributional effects of climate change taxes on households belonging to different income and lifestyle groups; and it compares the effects of a CO(2) tax with a multiple GHG tax in the UK in terms of cost efficiency and distributional effects. Results show that a multi GHG tax is more efficient than a CO(2) tax due to lower marginal abatement costs, and that both taxes are regressive, with lower income households paying a relatively larger share of their income for the taxes than higher income households. A shift from a CO(2) tax to a GHG tax will reduce and shift the tax burden between consumption categories such as from energy-intensive products to food products. Consumers have different abilities to respond to the tax and change their behavior due to their own socio-economic attributes as well as the physical environment such as the age of the housing stock, location, and the availability of infrastructure. The housing-related carbon emissions are the largest component of the CO(2) tax payments for low income groups and arguments could be made for compensation of income losses and reduction of fuel poverty through further government intervention.

While park-people conflicts have received worldwide attention, the extent of illegal resource extraction and the relationship with communities' livelihoods has gained little attention in the literature. Thus this paper investigates the impact of socio-economic factors involved in illegal fuel wood and fodder extraction at Bardia National Park in Nepal. Household questionnaires, key-informant interviews and focus groups were conducted to identify different plant species used by households and explore the causes and mode of resource extraction in three buffer zone villages in the park. Altogether 50 different plants were identified by villagers that were used regularly for different livelihood purposes. Almost half of the respondents met their needs by illegally and regularly extracting resources from the park. Incentive schemes in the form of development projects were important but not sufficient in meeting the basic needs of households' especially for such daily items such as fuel wood and fodder. The results described in this paper showed that proximity and access to resources either in the national park, the buffer zone community forest or the government forest, and impact on the livelihoods significantly influenced the likelihood of illegal resource extraction activities. Villages that differed in terms of their location to the resource base, the provision of alternative resources and influence of these on their livelihoods showed significant differences in terms of their patterns of resource extraction and use of these resources. As resource use options, resource interest, and resource extraction patterns were different between villages and dependent on circumstances specific to villages, site-specific management strategies were necessary and more influential than the enforcement of 'one-size fits all' policies. It is suggested that park management plans should be flexible and adaptive enough to meet site-specific contexts and to endear wider support from local communities.

The repercussions of climate change will be felt in various ways throughout both natural and human systems in Sub-Saharan Africa. Climate change projections for this region point to a warming trend, particularly in the inland subtropics; frequent occurrence of extreme heat events; increasing aridity; and changes in rainfall—with a particularly pronounced decline in southern Africa and an increase in East Africa. The region could also experience as much as one meter of sea-level rise by the end of this century under a 4 °C warming scenario. Sub-Saharan Africa’s already high rates of undernutrition and infectious disease can be expected to increase compared to a scenario without climate change. Particularly vulnerable to these climatic changes are the rainfed agricultural systems on which the livelihoods of a large proportion of the region’s population currently depend. As agricultural livelihoods become more precarious, the rate of rural–urban migration may be expected to grow, adding to the already significant urbanization trend in the region. The movement of people into informal settlements may expose them to a variety of risks different but no less serious than those faced in their place of origin, including outbreaks of infectious disease, flash flooding and food price increases. Impacts across sectors are likely to amplify the overall effect but remain little understood.

Abstract Awareness in Central and Eastern European countries of environmental problems is growing rapidly. Yet the social, economic, and political barriers to implementing drastic policy measures are still formidable. The acceptability of policy measures can be improved when the environmental and economic implications of alternative measures are shown in conjunction. Therefore, a prototype Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model is constructed for Lithuania. A key question in Lithuania concerns the future use of nuclear-generated power. Using the CGE model, medium-term scenarios describing combinations of high or low economic activity, fuel prices, and nuclear potential are run for the year 2000.

Over the last decade, significant attention has been devoted to Closed-Loop Supply Chain (CLSC) design problems. As such, this review aims at assessing whether the current modelling approaches for CLSC problems can support the transition towards a Circular Economy at a supply chain level. The paper comprehensively assesses the extent to which existing modelling approaches evaluate the performance of supply chains across the complete spectrum of sustainability dimensions. Also, the capability of the current approaches of incorporating strategic, tactical, and operational decisions is considered, along with adopted solution methodologies. As a result, a comprehensive analysis was performed on 254 selected articles. This paper emphasises how most of the current literature in the field is affected by a disconnection between supply chain design and the founding principles of Circular Economy. Specifically, the CLSC literature exhibits a reductionist interpretation of the Circular Economy. CLSC studies focusing on all three dimensions of sustainability are relatively rare, and performance measurement approaches appear to be very much focused on monetary issues. While methodological contributions appear adequate to focus on the non-deterministic nature of CLSC design problems, there is paucity of empirically-grounded research. Coherently, a research agenda is proposed, in order to address the mentioned gaps and increase the relevance of this research field to practice.

Recently, in the economics literature, several papers have put forward arguments for using a declining discount rate in social-cost benefit analysis. This paper examines the impact of employing a declining discount rate on the social cost of carbon-the marginal social damage from a ton of emitted carbon. Six declining discounting schemes are implemented in the FUND 2.8 integrated assessment model, including the recent amendments to the Green Book of HM Treasury (Treasury, H.M., 2003. The Greenbook: Appraisal and Evaluation in Central Government. TSO, London). We find that using a declining schedule of discount rates increases the social cost of carbon estimate by as little as 10% or by as much as a factor of 40, depending upon the scenario selected. Although the range of plausible estimates is large, using declining discounting schemes in FUND 2.8 in most cases does not yield values at the £70/tC level suggested by UK DEFRA [Clarkson, R., Deyes, K., 2002. Estimating the social cost of carbon emissions. Government Economic Service Working Paper. HM Treasury, London]. Indeed, only at the higher end of the values of social cost of carbon found here would many climate change related policies - such as the Kyoto Protocol - pass a cost-benefit analysis. This conclusion, however, does not necessarily undermine the ethical and political economic reasons for supporting international collective action on climate change. © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.