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Malaysia is located in Southeast Asia near the equator within the typical tropical climatic zone. The efficient use of energy is vital due to the dependency on fossil resources that are being exhausted, which ultimately cause CO 2 emissions. Economic development and population growth are deemed to affect the growing energy demand in the country. Therefore, sustainability, energy security, and climate change are crucial challenges for the power sector in Malaysia. The aforementioned issues can be tackled with energy efficient measures in the building sector. Buildings in Malaysia consume 14.3% of the overall energy and 53% of only electrical energy is being consumed in residential and commercial sectors. Therefore, energy efficiency in buildings is crucial in order to reduce the energy use and improve the local environmental sustainability. This paper discusses a review on the building energy scenario, the policy perspectives, building energy efficiency programs along with landmark buildings and their characteristics. Besides, the potential of renewable energy resources in buildings and various prospective issues and challenges faced by the country have also been discussed. The significant review content thus benefits researchers, scientists and practitioners for a better understanding on energy efficiency and the sustainable measures that have been so far taken. The review also puts forward some actions to promote building energy efficiency and conservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to bring afront the economical and the ecological consequences of the growth path of Turkey with the help of a sectoral dataset provided by the World Input–Output Database available for the period of 1995–2009. By simple Input–Output accounting, it is found that the economic growth path taken in the 2003–2009 period has gradually become both more energy and pollution intensive as compared to the 1995–2002 period. Moreover, the gradual deterioration in environmental, as well as labor standards, so as to gain competitive edge in export markets led to a rapid increase in environmental degradation and deadly workplace accidents during the post-2002 period. From the viewpoint of the long-term development plans, i.e. Vizyon 2023 which targets to bring Turkey among the 10th biggest economy in the world by 2023, past experiences, therefore, hint that the insistence on an unsustainable and dependent economic growth path which has been re-designed under the neoliberal framework of deregulation, flexibilization and privatization will aggravate not only social and ecological problems but also the current account imbalance. It is concluded that the economic growth path towards the ambitious targets set by Vizyon 2023 should be redefined in accordance with the economic, social and environmental sustainability principles. The existing subsidies to fossil fuels should be channelled to support renewable energy production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Urbanization, sustainability, energy efficiency, information and communication technology (ICT) and nanotechnology are emerging at the beginning of the 21st century. They are seeking to improve environmental effectiveness in the context of connected communities, global competitiveness, economic development, climate change, and demographic shifts. Virtually all proposed solutions to energy consumption and climate change acknowledge the role ICT plays as a key enabler of environmental effectiveness. One of the major challenges that the ICT sector faces today is that hardware is being pushed to its physical limits. The traditional means to reduce product size, increase functionality and enhance computing capabilities are becoming difficult and expensive every passing day. On the other hand, the industry is benefiting from nanotechnology advances with numerous applications including those in smarter sensors, logic elements, computer chips, memory storage devices, optoelectronics, quantum computing, etc. This paper presents an overview of the ICT benefiting from development in nanotechnology with respect to sustainability and energy efficiency. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Despite numerous studies of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC), the evidence is still inconclusive and little has been done to capture the issue of environmental sustainability and welfare aspects of growth in the EKC relationship. Accordingly, this paper aims to investigate the environment-development linkage under a sustainability-oriented EKC framework in 20 sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries for the period from 1990 to 2015. The Common Correlated Effects version of Pooled Mean Group Estimator (CCE-PMG) in the context of error-correction based panel Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model augmented with cross-sectional averages was employed as a preferred estimation technique. The study also used an appropriate U test to check the presence of genuine inverted U-shaped EKC relationship. The results confirm the existence of a modified EKC hypothesis in SSA, but the linkage depends on the extent of endowment of natural resources. Among the growth-related factors, energy consumption and trade openness are found to have a long run detrimental effect on the environment. The study suggests that country's effort for economic development needs to be accompanied by appropriate policy options to ensure environmental sustainability. • Modified EKC = baseline EKC + Sustainability. • An appropriate U-test was employed to check the presence of genuinely inverted U-shaped EKC hypothesis. • The findings support a modified EKC hypothesis for resource-intensive SSA countries. • A monotonically increasing relationship is found in non-resource intensive SSA countries. • Economic development can be seen as a solution to environmental degradation. • Country's growth efforts need to be supplemented with pro-environmental measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]