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The EU has committed to make Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. Reaching this objective requires massive changes in the region. The biggest challenge is that the green transition happens without sacrificing economic progress and guaranteeing justice and inclusiveness. This pledge implies that every country be capable of addressing the trade-offs between targets while remaining committed towards the common decarbonisation goal. Our paper analyses the success with which countries are carrying out the energy transition. We propose an enhanced hyperbolic distance function and a stochastic frontier analysis approach to model the joint attainment of economic development, environmental sustainability, and energy equity. We apply our model to an unbalanced panel dataset of 29 European countries for the period 2005–2018. Our estimates show that the average performance of the economies has improved over time. The results also highlight the pivotal role of a sustainable economic development with clean energies for both slashing CO 2 emissions and fostering energy equity. Moreover, we find convergence in countries' performance, being this convergence slightly higher for the EU-15 countries compared to the rest. Finally, we show that a higher share of renewable energy sources helps countries that are lagging behind to reach their optimal performance level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shaping change such that it avoids losing potentially useful options for future development is a challenging task in the face of complex, coevolving socio-ecological systems. Sustainability appraisal methods, which open up dialogue and options before closing down and making suggestions, pay attention to the inclusion of various and conflicting points of view and address uncertainty, are increasingly used in the science, environment and energy policy domains. The quality of the process is seen as key to high quality appraisal outcomes. Dimensions of quality include learning opportunities which are seen as ways for addressing complexity and uncertainty. Participatory sustainability appraisal methods intend to support social learning among participants. Despite high expectations, social learning processes in sustainability appraisals are poorly conceptualized and empirically understudied. This paper (1) briefly reviews theories of social learning; (2) develops a conceptual framework for the analysis; and (3) presents an empirical application of the framework by use of data obtained from three energy and natural resource management case studies around Europe. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Climate change research is currently a topic of great interest for economic researchers. In particular, environmental input–output analysis increasingly plays an important role in measuring the economic and environmental effects of sustainable development policies in Europe. Other approaches also exist, such as econometric modelling, in which impacts are quantified on statistical grounds and with certain desirable properties (efficient estimates, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing, etc.) that are not found in the input–output approach. Consequently, this paper merges the two approaches to address the calculation of unbiased and consistent carbon dioxide emission multipliers for Denmark and their respective confidence intervals. The use of the supply and use system instead of the symmetric input–output table also presents the opportunity to avoid the common problems associated with the construction of technical coefficients (technology assumptions, negatives, etc.). Moreover, a new policy-relevant application of these multipliers is introduced: the quantification of the performance of the carbon dioxide emission reductions carried out by industries via external trading. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]