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Abstract This study investigates the macroeconomic effects of adverse oil price shocks on a small oil-exporting economy — the Azerbaijan economy. We estimate a recursive (near) VAR model by using monthly macroeconomic data from 2006 to 2018. The results indicate the Azerbaijan economy is adversely influenced by an oil price decline. Specifically, we find that a negative oil price shock deteriorates trade balance, causes a currency depreciation, increases inflation and falls economic activity. Furthermore, our findings imply that the oil price-led devaluation shapes the inflationary and recessionary consequences of this shock.

Abstract The Chinese government has taken measures to realize energy-savings and emission reductions, such as promoting innovations, adjusting the industrial structure, balancing regional development, and reforming markets. The aim of this paper is to assess the effects of these measures on China's CO2 emissions by using a newly proposed decomposition approach, which identified eight new factors related to the above realistic measures, i.e., energy saving and production technologies, industrial energy and production efficiencies, regional energy and production efficiencies, and pure energy and production efficiencies. The main findings indicate benefits from considerable technological progress in energy-saving and production during 2000–2016 period, and two technological factors contributed the most to emissions abatement and cumulatively reduced 5372.43 Mt and 1291.72 Mt CO2 emissions. The efforts of industrial restructuring promoted energy and production efficiency improvement, which further facilitated emission reduction. In contrast, the pure energy and production efficiency changes cumulatively led to 1080.26 Mt and 1135.85 Mt CO2 emissions growth during the whole sample period, suggesting that severe resource misallocation problems may exist in both the energy market and output market. Additionally, the Chinese government failed to narrow the technology gap between developed regions and underdeveloped regions, further restricting emission reduction.

A promising route to transition wastewater treatment facilities (WWTFs) from energy-consuming to net energy-positive is to retrofit existing facilities with process modifications, residual biosolid upcycling, and effluent thermal energy recovery. This study assesses the economics and life cycle environmental impacts of three proposed retrofits of WWTFs that consider thermochemical conversion technologies, namely, hydrothermal liquefaction, slow pyrolysis, and fast pyrolysis, along with advanced bioreactors. The results are in turn compared to the reference design, showing the retrofitting design with hydrothermal liquefaction, and an up-flow anaerobic sludge blanket has the highest net present value (NPV) of $177.36MM over a 20-year plant lifetime despite 15% higher annual production costs than the reference design. According to the ReCiPe method, chlorination is identified as the major contributor for most impact categories in all cases. There are several uncertainties embedded in the techno-economic analysis and life cycle assessment, including the discount rate, capital investment, sewer rate, and prices of main products; among which, the price of biochar presents the widest variation from $50 to $1900/t. Sensitivity analyses reveal that the variation of discount rates causes the most significant changes in NPVs. The impact of the biochar price is more pronounced in the slow pyrolysis-based pathway compared to the fast pyrolysis since biochar is the main product of slow pyrolysis.

AbstractRemittances to the Philippines constitute a prominent part of its economy. However, remittances' effects on its environment have not been researched. In this regard, this research examines the direct and indirect impacts of remittance inflows on the Philippines' environmental sustainability for the 1977–2016 period by proposing a multivariate model, and by utilising the augmented ARDL and VECM methods to estimate this model. Our findings indicate that remittance inflows threaten environmental sustainability in the long‐run both directly and indirectly through boosting income and energy (oil) consumption. The results additionally imply that income and energy consumption also increase the ecological footprint of the Philippines in the long‐run. However, economic globalisation's long‐run impact is insignificant, yet its short‐run impact is significantly negative on the country's level of environmental degradation. Additionally, the findings reveal that the feedback hypothesis is valid between income and energy consumption in the long‐run, but the neutrality hypothesis is valid in the short‐run. This research's findings reveal that remittance inflows' impact on the environment is significant, and can occur through direct and various indirect channels, therefore, these inflows should be an integral part of sustainability policies in the Philippines, as ignoring them could cause further environmental decline.

Abstract Given the need to reduce the CO2 emissions coming from the manufacturing sector, it is important, for planning purposes, to know which countries and which manufacturing sub-sectors have the greatest potential for reducing energy use. Using data from the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, the authors estimate trends in global decoupling of energy use and manufacturing value added, compare energy-use intensity in six country groups and estimate the potential for reducing energy use and CO2 emissions under two scenarios and compare selected sub-sector energy intensity and estimate the potential for reducing energy use CO2 emissions. The comparison of energy intensities across country groups and among countries suggests that there still remains significant potential to reduce energy use and associated CO2 emissions. The analysis of four sub-sectors in developing and transition economies also shows similar but varied potential for reducing energy use and associated CO2 emissions.

There are papers on association about natural resources, economic expansion, and their effect on the quality of the environment in Central Asia. However, no study has investigated the effect of human capital in this nexus concerning the Central Asian states. Thus this study investigates the link between natural resources, economic expansion, human capital, and CO2 in Central Asian states by employing Pooled Mean Group (PMG) and the Dumitrescu and Hurlin (DH) causality tests from 1995 to 2018. The outcomes from the PMG model showed that human capital has an opposite and significant association with CO2 in the short and long run. Therefore, it is stated that local human capital with higher environmental awareness through education and training makes a positive impact on environmental quality. With the growth of the natural resources index and expansion of the economy, Central Asian emissions will rise. With a positive and substantial coefficient of the natural resources, the finding suggests that, even though Central Asian states have plenty of natural resources, they are unable to exploit them efficiently to reap good rent advantages to reduce the emissions. The outcomes of the causality test stated that the index of natural resources, economic expansion, and human capital have one-way causality with emissions. The important policies and recommendations for maintaining the economic and environmental sustainability of this country are provided at the end of this paper.

SummaryThe German government has adopted a law that requires sewage plants to go beyond the recovery of phosphorus from wastewater and to promote recycling. We argue that there is no physical global short‐ or mid‐term phosphorus scarcity. However, we also argue that there are legitimate reasons for policies such as those of Germany, including: precaution as a way to ensure future generations’ long‐term supply security, promotion of technologies for closed‐loop economics in a promising stage of technology development, and decrease in the current supply risk with a new resource pool.

Due to various environmental degradation and natural resource depletion around the world, researchers' and policymakers' attention has turned to what causes environmental degradation. The pursuit of a healthy environment has become a global challenge, a problem that affects more than one nation. Climate change is causing severe weather conditions in every world, disrupting economies and affecting the lives of many people. Hence, the study analyzes how trade and economic growth impact environmental degradation in Belgium, the USA, and Canada using panel data from 1995 to 2016. The study utilized the autoregressive distributed lag approach to provide new evidence and policy implications. The outcome confirmed the presence of cointegration among the selected variables. However, it was observed that economic growth decreases environmental degradation in the long run while trade openness shows a positively insignificant relationship with carbon emission. Nevertheless, a positive short-run relationship was observed between economic growth and carbon emissions whereas a negatively insignificant relationship was observed for trade and carbon emission. The findings prompted policy implications that more trading could be done between the countries. When countries trade more, their economies will flourish, ensuring global prosperity and minimizing environmental degradation.

Abstract The transportation sector is one of the main contributors to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. As the efforts towards emission mitigation increase, the expectation from the sector arises equally. In this analysis, the transportation sector of Turkey is studied to shed light on the future based on historical realizations. In this respect, the Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index (LMDI) method is used to assess and reveal the influential factors on CO2 emissions in the sector between 2000 and 2017. The emission intensity of the sector and fuel switching shows promising trends from 2000 through 2010, whereas growing preference for SUVs challenges emission reductions between 2010 and 2017. The results indicate that i) The transportation sector CO2 emissions are mainly driven upwards by economic growth, followed by population and emission intensity effects from 2000 to 2017 ii) The overall impact of transportation intensity shows significant reduction potential iii) Fuel switching incentives and fleet efficiency have a positive effect on emission mitigation from 2000 through 2010. However, this gain is reduced due to the rising popularity of SUVs in the rest of the analysis period. In this respect, CO2 emission mitigation in the transportation sector necessitates 1) careful planning of demand management for freight transportation including master designs production/manufacturing sites, material flows, and demand points coupled with economic activities 2) passenger transportation measures to reduce passenger car travel including zoning for public transit corridors, improved public transportation system 3) well-structured incentives on energy-efficient cars and clean energy technologies such as electric vehicles to convince individuals. Analysis can be generalized on a global scale due to the similar dynamics inherent in the sector.