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Decarbonization plans depend on the rapid, large-scale deployment of batteries to sufficiently decarbonize the electricity system and on-road transport. This can take many forms, shaped by technology, materials, and supply chain selection, which will have local and global environmental and social impacts. Current knowledge gaps limit the ability of decision-makers to make choices in facilitating battery deployment that minimizes or avoids unintended environmental and social consequences. These gaps include a lack of harmonized, accessible, and up-to-date data on manufacturing and supply chains and shortcomings within sustainability and social impact assessment methods, resulting in uncertainty that limits incorporation of research into policy making. These gaps can lead to unintended detrimental effects of large-scale battery deployment. To support decarbonization goals while minimizing negative environmental and social impacts, we elucidate current barriers to tracking how decision-making for large-scale battery deployment translates to environmental and social impacts and recommend steps to overcome them.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present pedagogical approaches developed and implemented to deliver sustainable design education (SDE) to second-year undergraduate students on civil engineering programmes in the (then) School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences at Newcastle University. In doing so, the work presented offers an example of how to help students understand the contested and contingent nature of sustainability. Design/methodology/approach: The research presented takes an action-based approach to the development of a teaching and assessment model centered on problem- and project-based learning in a real-world context. Findings: Because of the use of a design brief, which addresses a practical infrastructure problem encountered by regional communities, the academic team were able to make arguments related to the three pillars of sustainability more accessible to the students. This suggests that pedagogical instruments based on problem- and project-based learning strategies are effective in delivering SDE. Practical implications: The successful delivery of SDE requires commitment from the senior management teams leading individual departments as well as commitments embedded in the high-level strategies of Higher Education institutions. It was also found that some students need extra support from the teaching staff if their engagement through SDE is to be successful. This has practical implications for the amount of contact time built into undergraduate and postgraduate degree programmes. Originality/value: The teaching and assessment model presented in this paper addresses various substantive and normative issues associated with SDE making it relevant and transferable to courses other than civil engineering.

There are global aspirations to reach net zero emissions, which triggered the development of standards, guidance and tools to measure and manage climate action across countries, sectors and companies. However, carbon accounting inaccuracies, ambiguous emissions disclosures and unambitious climate targets are hampering these aspirations. This paper reports on the disparity between high‐level guidance and practical implementation of carbon accounting and reporting at company level. By conducting a systematic literature analysis and focussing on the English Water sector, we utilise case study data from Northumbrian Water Limited (NWL), to identify limitations in the current guidance and frameworks. The results indicate the necessity for enhanced alignment in high‐level guidance, particularly regarding the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and the Science‐Based Target Initiative. It is evident that clarity and consistency from high‐level resources are essential for climate mitigation. This paper shows, depending on the sector and company types, that different benefits are gained from using the available resources. We propose a carbon measurement and management process for the English Water sector (and beyond) to reach net zero targets and make recommendations for decision makers. This helps to understand best practices of carbon accounting and reporting and to make effective investment decisions. Consequently, we advocate for policy interventions to improve the standardisation of carbon accounting models. Harmonising international regulatory frameworks and standards is needed, which will empower organisations to effectively assess, manage and reduce their carbon footprints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Now is the time to refocus efforts in urban research and design. A changing climate and extreme weather events are presenting unique challenges to urban systems around the world. These challenges illuminate the social barriers that accompany disruptive events such as resource inequities and injustices. In this perspective, we provide three research priorities for just and sustainable urban systems that help to address these matters. The three research priorities are: (1) social equity and justice, (2) circularity, and (3) digital twins. Conceptual context and future research directions are provided for each. For social equity and justice, the future directions are mandatory equity analysis and inclusionary practices, understanding and reconciling historical injustices, and intentional integration with diverse community stakeholders. For circularity applications, they are better metrics for integration, more robust evaluation frameworks, and dynamic modeling at multiple spatial and temporal scales. Future directions for digital twins include developing principles to reduce complexity, integrating model and system components, and reducing barriers to data access. These research priorities are core to meeting several of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (i.e., 1—No Poverty, 8—Decent Work and Economic Growth, 10—Reduced Inequalities, and 11—Sustainable Cities and Communities). Useful social and technical matters are discussed throughout, where we highlight the importance of prioritizing localized research efforts, provide guidance for community‐engaged research and co‐development practices, and explain how these priorities interact to align with the evolving field of industrial ecology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the threat of irreversible climate change has increased over time, the UK has continued to set increasingly ambitious policies to reduce its carbon emission. An assessment of mitigation progress to date at the local authority level clarifies the factors that have affected greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions on the path to carbon neutrality. This research uses regression analyses between local authorities' GHG emission redcutions and selected explanatory variables (including population density, household income, and manufacturing employment) identified from the literature to explore mitigation performance over time, focusing on GHG emissions changes between 2005 and 2016. Substantial and relatively consistent GHG emissions reductions were achieved in this time frame, with average total reductions across UK local authorities of 31.2%. Population density was moderately-to-strongly correlated with the success of transportation GHG emissions mitigation, though this sector has seen the smallest percentage declines over this period. Local authorities with densities below 25 inhabitants per hectare were generally among the poorest performers in transportation GHG mitigation. This underscores the need to support remote working and electrification of personal transportation in areas where public/active transportation options are not viable alternatives. Furthermore, consideration of population density in conjunction with domestic and urban planning will allow for future emissions reductions to occur across the UK. Fundamentally, GHG emissions reductions to date are largely driven by historic factors (density), shifting economic structures (deindustrialisation), and centralised initiatives (decarbonisation of electricity generation). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Material efficiency (ME) strategies are pursued by governments and companies to reduce environmental emissions, improve supply chain resilience, and enhance cost competitiveness. Material flow analysis (MFA) methods are useful to quantify raw material stocks and flows and assess the potential impacts of ME strategies. Although the popularity of MFA methods is increasing, there are methodological limitations that hinder its use as a decision support tool for prospective assessments. To overcome some of these, MFA is increasingly integrated with other methods from different research fields. This paper categorizes integrated MFA methods by identifying and explaining the methods and their applications. A semi‐structured literature review screened a wide range of methods integrated with MFA prospective analysis and evaluated their applications from 158 studies. This showed that integrated MFA can be used to: (1) include economic, social, and environmental layers; (2) improve the technical foundation of MFA by including entropy and exergy analyses and process engineering methods; (3) include economic mechanisms and link the economic system to the material system; and (4) improve the representation of materials in existing methods and models. Our research demonstrates that integrated MFA should be a central method in planning and designing ME strategies for companies and governments. This paper provides an important knowledge base of integrated MFA methods and creates a discussion point on MFA, where the research field is currently at or indeed where it could be heading in the future, that is, "Quo Vadis" MFA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change mitigation strategies are developed at international, national, and local authority levels. Technological solutions such as renewable energies (RE) and electric vehicles (EV) have geographically widespread knock-on effects on raw materials. In this paper, a decision-support and data-visualization tool named "LAYERS" is presented, which applies a material flow analysis to illustrate the complex connections along supply chains for carbon technologies. A case study focuses on cobalt for lithium-ion batteries (LIB) required for EVs. It relates real business data from mining and manufacturing to actual EV registrations in the UK to visualize the intended and unintended consequences of the demand for cobalt. LAYERS integrates a geographic information systems (GIS) architecture, database scheme, and whole series of stored procedures and functions. By means of a 3D visualization based on GIS, LAYERS conveys a clear understanding of the location of raw materials (from reserves, to mining, refining, manufacturing, and use) across the globe. This highlights to decision makers the often hidden but far-reaching geo-political implications of the growing demands for a range of raw materials that are needed to meet long-term carbon-reduction targets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among existing and emerging technologies to recycle spent lithium‐ion batteries (LIBs) from electric vehicles, pyrometallurgical processes are commercially used. However, very little is known about their environmental and energy impacts. In this study, three pyrometallurgical technologies are analyzed and compared in terms of global warming potential (GWP) and cumulative energy demand (CED), namely: an emerging direct current (DC) plasma smelting technology (Sc‐1), the same DC plasma technology but with an additional pre‐treatment stage (Sc‐2), and a more commercially mature ultra‐high temperature (UHT) furnace (Sc‐3). The net impacts for the recovered metals are calculated using both "open‐loop" and "closed‐loop" recycling options. Results reveal that shifting from the UHT furnace technology (Sc‐3) to the DC plasma technology could reduce the GWP of the recycling process by up to a factor of 5 (when employing pre‐treatment, as is the case with Sc‐2). Results also vary across factors, for example, different metal recovery rates, carbon/energy intensity of the electricity grid (in Sc‐1 and Sc‐2), rates of aluminum recovery (in Sc‐2), and sources of coke (in Sc‐3). However, the sensitivity analysis showed that these factors do not change the best option which was determined before (as Sc‐2) except in a few cases for CED. Overall, the research methodology and application presented by this life cycle assessment informs future energy and environmental impact assessment studies that want to assess existing recycling processes of LIB or other emerging technologies. This article met the requirements for a gold–silver JIE data openness badge described at http://jie.click/badges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a snapshot of key challenges encountered by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) devoted to green production systems acting on the call to substantiate their environmental claims. It highlights the overriding barriers of SMEs to meeting the standards for conducting credible product life cycle assessment (LCA), in terms of accessibility to customised data and epistemological limitations. This is illustrated using a real-world example describing the material and process flows for a recycling company. We demonstrate that the rigour towards compiling large (and in some cases nested) data sets, involving expert know-how and adequate representation of system boundary can pose operational barriers. This is underpinned by complications of conducting green production and process-based LCA, deemed essential in ascertaining product and process sustainability. Finally, the paper discusses issues highlighted by the case study and provides useful directions for production researchers, SMEs and consultants. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines employees' work-related attitudes to recycling and waste management systems whilst retaining a link with personal domestic behavior. A questionnaire of 38 Likert-type items measured employee attitudes to environmental, waste management and recycling, environmental and sustainability concerns, perceived costs and benefits to the company. The hypotheses included demographic differences in attitudes, that attitudes and behavior are related and that behaviors transfer from home to work. The sample included 189 employees from 6 northern UK companies. A factor analysis reduced the attitudes items into four factors, being a positive approach to company recycling, that policies are needed, that recycling is costly to the company and that recycling can earn money. The factors were correlated with behavioral measures and compared by demographics and past recycling behavior using t-tests and ANOVAs. The results show differences in attitudes and behaviors by job type and age, that recycling at work and home are unrelated but that use of eco-friendly products is related to attitudes and concern about depletion of natural resources. The findings are discussed in terms of attitude theories, workplace behavior, training and communications about environmental and waste management in companies plus the transferability of these findings to other types of management systems, other sectors or regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Failure to consider the costs of adaptation strategies can be seen by decision makers as a barrier for implementing coastal protection measures. In order to validate adaptation strategies to sea-level rise in the form of coastal protection, a consistent and repeatable assessment of the costs is necessary. This paper significantly extends current knowledge on costestimates by developing, and implementing using real coastal dike data, probabilistic functions of dike costs. With the aim of providing a reproducible estimate of typical sea dike costs and their uncertainty we analyse data from Canada and the Netherlands and relate this to published studies from the US, UK, and Vietnam. We plot the costs divided by dike length as a function of height and test four different regression models. Our analysis shows that a linear function without intercept is sufficient to model the costs, i.e. fixed costs and higher order contributions such as from the volume of core fill material are less significant. We also characterise the spread around the regression models which represents an uncertainty stemming from factors beyond dike length and height. Drawing the analogy to project cost overruns, we employ log-normal distributions and calculate that the range between 3x and x/3 contains 95 % of the data, where x represents the corresponding regressionvalue. We compare our estimates with previously published unit costs for other countries. We note that the unit costs not onlydepend on the country and land-use (urban/non-urban) of the sites where the dikes are being constructed but also characteristicsincluded in the costs, e.g. property acquisition, utility relocation, project management. We provide recommendations how toimprove the reporting and estimating of the costs in order to support future adaptation studies worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities are recognised as key players in global adaptation and mitigation efforts because the majority of people live in cities. However, in Europe, which is highly urbanized and one of the most advanced regions in terms of environmental policies, there is considerable diversity in the regional distribution, ambition and scope of climate change responses. This paper explores potential factors contributing to such diversity in 200 large and medium-sized cities across 11 European countries. We statistically investigate institutional, socio-economic, environmental and vulnerability characteristics of cities as potential drivers of or barriers to the development of urban climate change plans. Our results show that factors such as membership of climate networks, population size, GDP per capita and adaptive capacity act as drivers of mitigation and adaptation plans. By contrast, factors such as the unemployment rate, warmer summers, proximity to the coast and projected exposure to future climate impacts act as barriers. We see that, overall, it is predominantly large and prosperous cities that engage in climate planning, while vulnerable cities and those at risk of severe climate impacts in the future are less active. Our analysis suggests that climate change planning in European cities is not proactive, i.e. not significantly influenced by anticipated future impacts. Instead, we found that the current adaptive capacity of a city significantly relates to climate planning. Along with the need to further explore these relations, we see a need for more economic and institutional support for smaller and less resourceful cities and those at high risk from climate change impacts in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]