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While the COVID-19 pandemic appeared to temper concerns about climate change in 2020, the issue has risen to prominence again in 2021. The majority of Australians (60%) say ‘global warming is a serious and pressing problem…we should begin taking steps now, even if this involves significant costs’. This represents a reversal of the dip in 2020 during the early days of the pandemic, but remains eight points below the high watermark of concern in 2006. A third of Australians (30%) say the problem of global warming should be addressed, but its effects will be gradual, so we can deal with the problem gradually by taking steps that are low in cost. Only 9% of Australians — one of the lowest results of the past decade — say that until we are sure that global warming is really a problem, we should not take any steps that would have economic costs. As in recent years, there is a significant gap between younger and older Australians’ concerns about global warming. Despite a slight narrowing between the generations, the margin is still noteworthy, with three-quarters (76%) of Australians aged 18–29 saying global warming is a serious and pressing problem, compared with 50% of those over 60. Concern about global warming appears to be narrowing slightly between the urban and rural populations, with just a 7-point gap between the 63% of Australians living in cities saying that global warming is a serious and pressing problem, and the 56% of the regional and remote population.

This Deliverable 3.4 aims to elicit stakeholders’ experience and perspectives concerning renewable energy communities (RECs), to identify solutions to improve legal and policy frameworks and provide enabling conditions for RECs development, and opportunities and limitations for cross-country knowledge transfer. Building on the in-depth and qualitative study on how relevant actors perceive drivers and barriers to establish and successfully run RECs in Deliverable 2.3 - Synthesis Report on case-studies of drivers and barriers in five selected target regions (Standal et al. 2022), this Deliverable explores national and target region stakeholders’ views on attitudes, motivations, relevant technologies and legal forms, promising sectors for RECs, main barriers for developing RECs. Furthermore, the stakeholders’ familiarity with REDII and REC as a concept is explored, as well as national and local policies and support mechanisms that are seen as relevant for cross-country/region transfer.

Article 6 of the Paris Agreement enables countries to utilize market and nonmarket approaches to achieve their nationally determined contributions. Yet, international negotiations on Article 6 are complex and ongoing. The Parties of the Paris Agreement have made progress on many issues, but contentious matters on political and technical aspects remain unresolved. This publication presents the latest developments in negotiations, discusses the key outcomes, and highlights the remaining unresolved issues leading up to the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties in Glasgow.

Recently two approaches to extend the photoluminescence imaging (PLI) technique by evaluating the dynamic properties of the sample have been presented. Time-resolved photoluminescence measurements may provide calibration-free maps of the effective minority charge carrier lifetime in silicon wafers. Due to the transient measurement they minimize errors due to lateral inhomogeneities in setup or sample, which would usually contribute linearly to steady-state PLI measurements. In this work, we will focus on mechanically shuttered time-resolved photoluminescence imaging (TR-PLI), as it provides a high measurement range down to 5 μs at low hardware costs. 26th European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference and Exhibition; 1463-1466

Knowledge of the carbon emissions elasticities of income and population is important both for climate change policy/negotiations and for generating projections of carbon emissions. However, previous estimations of these elasticities using the well-known STIRPAT framework have produced such wide-ranging estimates that they add little insight. This paper presents estimates of the STIRPAT model that address that shortcoming, as well as the issues of cross-sectional dependence, heterogeneity, and the nonlinear transformation of a potentially integrated variable, i.e., income. Among the findings are that the carbon emissions elasticity of income is highly robust; and that the income elasticity for OECD countries is less than one, and likely less than the non-OECD country income elasticity, which is not significantly different from one. By contrast, the carbon emissions elasticity of population is not robust; however, that elasticity is likely not statistically significantly different from one for either OECD or non-OECD countries. Lastly, the heterogeneous estimators were exploited to reject a Carbon Kuznets Curve: while the country-specific income elasticities declined over observed average income-levels, the trend line had a slight U-shape.

We study how spillovers from water pollution cleanup in the Ganges affect social welfare in an aggregate economy consisting of Kanpur and Varanasi, two cities through which this river flows. We view pollution cleanup in both cities as a local public good and point out that if Kanpur cleans up pollution in the Ganges then Varanasi obtains some spillover benefit and vice versa. In this setting, we first solve for the Nash equilibrium amounts of pollution cleanup in the two cities when decisions about how much pollution to clean up are made simultaneously; next, we determine the equilibrium welfare levels in each city. Second, on the assumption that decisions about how much pollution to clean up are centralized, we compute the amounts of pollution cleanup that maximize aggregate welfare. Finally, we describe an inter-city transfer scheme that leads each city to choose non-cooperatively in a Nash equilibrium the same pollution cleanup amounts as those that arise when aggregate welfare is maximized.

This paper aims to identify the magnitude of energy efficiency improvement, which has been promoted through energy efficiency labeling and the Minimum Energy Performance Standard, and to compare this against the increase in the number of products and the average increase in cooling capacity. Air conditioners (ACs) are one of the major contributors to energy consumption in a household. To assess the magnitude of this factor, we developed a formula to decompose total energy consumption from ACs into the number of ACs, their average cooling capacity, and energy efficiency. In the case of ACs in Thailand, energy efficiency improvement has offset the increase in the average AC cooling capacity. However, energy consumption from ACs increases with the number of ACs.