Tania Urmee

With less than seven years before the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals deadline, the race is on to achieve universal access to affordable, reliable and modern energy services in low-income communities in developing countries. These communities are mostly distant from central grids and economically suitable for off-grid mini-grid systems. Data suggest that these mini-grids are not sustained and often fail after a few years of operation. The authors investigated the challenges of an existing mini-grid system in Ghana and proposed measures to overcome them. Field surveys with expert stakeholders and users of the system were conducted to examine the challenges. The results showed that 98% of the residents use power for domestic purposes. The inability to pay for the power consumed was the highest-ranked challenge the users faced followed by power quality issues. From the expert stakeholders’ perspectives, economic challenges were the most significant barriers with a mean score range of 3.92 to 4.73 on a 1–5 Likert scale, followed by political challenges. The researchers propose that implementers must optimize non-hardware costs and promote local component manufacturing to address these economic challenges. In addition, we suggest that the government review the government-driven policy and involve the private sector.

As current action remains insufficient to meet the goals of the Paris agreement let alone to stabilize the climate, there is increasing hope that solutions related to demand, services and social aspects of climate change mitigation can close the gap. However, given these topics are not investigated by a single epistemic community, the literature base underpinning the associated research continues to be undefined. Here, we aim to delineate a plausible body of literature capturing a comprehensive spectrum of demand, services and social aspects of climate change mitigation. As method we use a novel double-stacked expert—machine learning research architecture and expert evaluation to develop a typology and map key messages relevant for climate change mitigation within this body of literature. First, relying on the official key words provided to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change by governments (across 17 queries), and on specific investigations of domain experts (27 queries), we identify 121 165 non-unique and 99 065 unique academic publications covering issues relevant for demand-side mitigation. Second, we identify a literature typology with four key clusters: policy, housing, mobility, and food/consumption. Third, we systematically extract key content-based insights finding that the housing literature emphasizes social and collective action, whereas the food/consumption literatures highlight behavioral change, but insights also demonstrate the dynamic relationship between behavioral change and social norms. All clusters point to the possibility of improved public health as a result of demand-side solutions. The centrality of the policy cluster suggests that political actions are what bring the different specific approaches together. Fourth, by mapping the underlying epistemic communities we find that researchers are already highly interconnected, glued together by common interests in sustainability and energy demand. We conclude by outlining avenues for interdisciplinary collaboration, synthetic analysis, community building, and by suggesting next steps for evaluating this body of literature.

Green Growth (GG) is about decoupling emission intensity from economic growth, which can be achieved by fostering positive economic growth through resource-efficiency, cleaner environment and increased resilience to climate change. Cities play an important role in economic development, as they are inhabited by a large proportion of the global population in a relatively small land area and cities are the wheel of the economy of a country. Implementation and measurement of GG in cities is challenging as the regulatory framework, roles and responsibilities to the citizen and the encompassing environment of cities differ significantly. This can be addressed by identifying a set of GG indicators that are relevant to target cities, which would be used by the cities to implement programs and policies, and to measure progress and performance. Australia is situated in an environment somewhat disconnected from the rest of the world, which is home to unique biodiversity and vulnerable ecosystems. The regulatory and institutional framework of Australian cities is different to many other cities in the world in terms of their obligations to the community and the environment, and the level of law enforcement, particularly in areas that are relevant for GG. This paper reviews the available GG indicators in cities and assesses the applicability of those indicators against the regulatory and institutional framework of Australian cities. The application of the proposed set of indicators to the City of Melbourne and the City of Perth helped to validate the appropriateness of those indicators and to assess the performance of the cities in relation to GG. It appears that the cities are performing well in some areas and need improvement in others. The cities also need to mainstream the GG indicators and to align their data measurement and recording systems in line with the proposed GG indicators.