Search

This paper argues for research into the effectiveness of government strategies for a 'carbon neutral public sector'. We review initiatives in three OECD countries: New Zealand, Australia and the UK. In all jurisdictions, government agencies have consistently stressed 'leading by example' as a rationale for adoption. 'Direct mandate' by the Prime Minister (NZ); 'organic development' from wider central government sustainability initiatives (UK); and a more 'laissez faire' approach by Australian Federal and State Governments, were identified as the general pathways leading to implementation. Our assessment indicates: a lack of understanding of the implementation process for carbon neutrality; a need to identify and critically examine the 'offset threshold' at which mitigation efforts cease and offsetting is adopted; an absence of any evaluation of the 'leading by example' rationale; a lack of inter-country comparisons; a gap in understanding the relationship with economic and social aspects of sustainability; and a need to evaluate the utility of core government departments as the focus of carbon accounting. We urge colleagues to consider research in this area with a view to contributing to the interdisciplinary solutions which we believe are required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With worldwide activities of carbon neutrality, clean energy is playing an important role these days. Natural gas (NG) is one of the most efficient clean energies with less harmful emissions and abundant reservoirs. This work aims at developing a swarm intelligence-based tool for NG forecasting to make more convincing projections of future energy consumption, combining Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) and the Salp Swarm Algorithm (SSA). The XGBoost is used as the core model in a nonlinear auto-regression procedure to make multi-step ahead forecasting. A cross-validation scheme is adopted to build a nonlinear programming problem for optimizing the most sensitive hyperparameters of the XGBoost, and then the nonlinear optimization is solved by the SSA. Case studies of forecasting the Natural gas consumption (NGC) in the United Kingdom (UK) and Netherlands are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed hybrid model in comparison with five other intelligence optimization algorithms and two other decision tree-based models (15 hybrid schemes in total) in 6 subcases with different forecasting steps and time lags. The results show that the SSA outperforms the other 5 algorithms in searching the optimal parameters of XGBoost and the hybrid model outperforms all the other 15 hybrid models in all the subcases with average MAPE 4.9828% in NGC forecasting of UK and 9.0547% in NGC forecasting of Netherlands, respectively. Detailed analysis of the performance and properties of the proposed model is also summarized in this work, which indicates it has high potential in NGC forecasting and can be expected to be used in a wider range of applications in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the resistance to shocks (economic, political, outbreaks etc.) of the ecological footprint in EU-5 countries over the period 1961–2016. The aim of the study is to determine whether the ecological footprint tends to return to the average with advanced econometric analysis. Efforts to move towards carbon neutrality, which increased after the Paris Agreement, are important for the countries in our analysis. To achieve our aim, we primarily used traditional and one-break unit root tests, followed by the novel SOR unit root test, which considers both sharp and smooth breaks to achieve robust results. The econometric findings show that EF and its six components (i.e., carbon, cropland, grazing land, forest, built-up land and fishing grounds) all contain unit root except the built-up land footprint for Spain and the grazing land and forest footprint for the United Kingdom. Our study provides policymakers with important information for implementing policies to reduce environmental pollution and achieve the target of carbon neutrality. • This study applies SOR unit root test, which considers both sharp and smooth breaks. • The results confirm efforts to move towards carbon neutrality in EU-5 countries. • The study contemplates policy recommendations aimed to reach carbon neutrality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]