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The paper discusses existing trends and prospects for decarbonization in the Commonwealth of Independent States (the CIS), an international organization that regroups Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. The CIS occupies a significant share of Eurasia, representing a large share of global energy consumption and production with a corresponding carbon footprint. These countries and their decarbonization prospects are rarely discussed in the English-language scientific literature. This paper fills in this gap by offering a comprehensive analysis based on statistical data, policy documents, and scenario-based future projections. The results underline that revisiting Nationally Determined Contributions, increasing energy efficiency, and decoupling GDP growth from greenhouse gas emissions are essential to the implementation of the Paris Agreement. The future energy mix should include larger shares of renewable energy, hydrogen, fossil fuels (highly efficient with carbon capture), and nuclear energy to achieve energy security and decarbonize the economy of the region in the long term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of smart cities, sustainability is an essential dimension. One of the ways to achieve sustainability and reduce the emission of greenhouse gases in smart cities is through the promotion of sustainable energy. The demand for affordable and reliable electrical energy requires different energy sources, where the cost of production often outweighs the environmental factor. This paper aims to investigate the ways smart cities promote sustainability in the electricity sector. For this, a systematic literature review using the PRISMA protocol was employed as the methodological approach. In this review, 154 journal articles were thoroughly analyzed. The results were grouped according to the themes and categorized into energy efficiency, renewable energies, and energy and urban planning. The study findings revealed the following: (a) global academic publication landscape for smart city and energy sustainability research; (b) unbalanced publications when critically evaluating geographical continents' energy use intensity vs. smart cities' energy sustainability research outcomes; (c) there is a heavy concentration on the technology dimension of energy sustainability and efficiency, and renewables topics in the literature, but much less attention is paid to the energy and urban planning issues. The insights generated inform urban and energy authorities and provide scholars with directions for prospective research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study estimates the amount of emissions resulting from linear sources. There were calculations for a model rural municipality, composed of national, provincial, country, and municipal roads that run through the area. In this study, the following categories of vehicles were assumed to travel along this route: motorcycles, passenger cars, light trucks (vans), heavy trucks without trailers, trucks with trailers, and buses. The analysis used data on the average volume of traffic (SDR) on selected roads on the territory of the sample municipality, based on the frequency of participation in traffic by each mode of transportation on selected road sections. To estimate the emission rates of each pollutant, for each vehicle category separately, the calculations were made based on the emission factor rates for each type of fuel. According to the adopted methodology and based on the adopted assumptions scenarios, pollutants' emissions were estimated. The implementation of the scenarios offered for reducing CO2 emissions has been proposed, and it is estimated that, depending on the variant adopted, the reductions will be between 13 and 21% in variant I, between 3 and 8% in variant II, and between 18 and 34% in combining these variants. The variant with a reduction in private car transportation in favor of bicycle transportation in combination with public transportation showed the most favorable effects on the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]