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Paper has shaped society for centuries and is considered one of humanity's most important inventions. However, pulp and paper products can be damaging to social and natural systems along their lifecycle of material extraction, processing, transportation, and waste handling. The pulp and paper industry is among the top five most energy-intensive industries globally and is the fourth largest industrial energy user. This industry accounts for approximately 6% of global industrial energy use and 2% of direct industrial CO2 emissions. The pulp and paper industry is also the largest user of original or virgin wood, with deleterious impacts on both human health and local flora and fauna, including aquatic ecosystems. This critical and systematic review seeks to identify alternatives for mitigating the climate impacts of pulp and paper processes and products, thus making the pulp and paper industry more environmentally sustainable. This study reviews 466 studies to answer the following questions: what are the main determinants of energy and carbon emissions emerging from the pulp and paper industry? What are the benefits of this industry adopting low-carbon manufacturing processes, and what barriers will need to be tackled to enable such adoption? Using a sociotechnical lens, we answer these questions, identify barriers for the pulp and paper industry's decarbonization, and present promising avenues for future research.

Green Energy efficiency is becoming more important because of the resulting cost reduction and image of green society which helps to enhance competitiveness in a globalized green market. Pulp and paper manufacturing is a large-scale industry which is generally regarded as important for national development. The Pulp and Paper industry consumes approximately 2.5% of total industrial energy consumption in Thailand by 44 factories distributed throughout the country. Therefore, energy efficiency improvement can play a significant role in the industry. Investigations of the cost effectiveness of energy efficiency measures and technologies using bottom-up Conservation Supply Curve (CSC) in the pulp and paper mill process are required. This study examines the concept, methodology, and the usefulness of the energy conservation supply curve, and the potential to create the appropriate energy policies to the Thai Pulp and Paper Industry.

Pulp and paper production, an energy-intensive process, is among the main light industries contributing to energy saving and pollution emission reduction in China. The improvement of energy efficiency is essential for energy consumption and sustainable development. This study analyzes the negative factors in the pulp and paper sector by calculating energy efficiency from the lengthways time and investigating the gap between China and foreign countries through a horizontal comparison. Accordingly, energy efficiency has increased in the Chinese pulp and paper industry with years of efforts, but its transformation remains unclear. Furthermore, the energy-saving potential, energy cost saving, and carbon dioxide emission reduction in the pulp and paper industry are evaluated according to the Twelfth Five-year Plan (2011–2015). The results show that the pulp and paper industry has further capabilities for energy-saving and carbon dioxide emission reduction by improving energy efficiency in China, resulting in great economic benefit. In brief, new technology and energy structure adjustment are long-term strategies for energy conversation, with changes in the scale of mills expected to provide huge opportunities to improve energy efficiency in China within a short period.

This study is a systematic survey of literature on the energy-growth nexus, which has been carried out with a view to identifying the leading sources of knowledge in the forms of the most influential journals, authors, and papers. This study not only recognizes and classifies the well-known methodologies used in the energy-growth nexus analysis but also reveals intriguing content-based findings, with quantitative measures for the top 50 papers ranked according to the highest average citations per year. This survey is unique in that the process of selecting articles is entirely objective, allowing the research community's opinions to take the lead in the process rather than any subjective judgments of the authors. In this way, we examine 1041 peer-reviewed articles that specifically focused on the energy-growth nexus. We found that, as of the end of 2017, with 200 articles, Energy Policy is the leading journal publishing on this area while Energy Economics, with a total of 25,352 citation counts, holds the highest impact on this field of research. In addition, the most frequently cited article by the scholastic community in terms of average citations per year has been a literature survey conducted by Ozturk (2010) . Our study's main conclusion, based on a thorough content analysis, is that the nexus results of previous studies are generally inconclusive, with conflicting policy implications. This is not helpful and to a large extent is due to a lack of an appropriate theory. This, we contend, is essentially a methodological weakness and could be addressed by incorporating an appropriate testable economic/environmental theory.

Several countries have recently realized that the present development paradigm is not sustainable from an environmental and energy point of view. The growing awareness of the population regarding environmental issues is pushing governments worldwide more and more to promote policies aiming at limiting harmful effects of human development. In particular, the rapid increase of the global temperature, especially in the polar regions, and the management of human wastes, mainly plastic in seas, are some of the main points to be addressed by these novel policies. Several actions must be implemented in order to limit such issues. Unfortunately, the recent COP 24 Conference was not successful, but hopefully an agreement will be established in 2020 at the COP 26 Conference. The effort performed by policymakers must be mandatorily supported by the scientific community. In this framework, this paper aims at showing that countries worldwide are trying to negotiate an agreement to increase energy efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In addition, in this paper all the researchers reported can provide quantitative measures of the actions to be implemented in order to address a sustainable and efficient use of energy. Here, innovations in terms of novel efficient and environmentally friendly technologies mainly based on renewable energy sources have been also investigated. The study also highlights different sectors that have been involved for this aim, such as energy conversion systems, urban areas, mobility, sustainability, water management, social aspects, etc. In this framework, specific conferences are periodically organized in order to provide a forum for discussion regarding these topics. In this area the Sustainable Development of Energy, Water and Environment Systems (SDEWES) conference is the most ordinary conference. The 13th Sustainable Development of Energy, Water and Environment Systems Conference was held in Palermo, Italy in 2018. The current Special Issue of Energies, precisely dedicated to the 13th SDEWES Conference, is based on three main topics: energy policy and energy efficiency in urban areas, energy efficiency in industry and biomass and other miscellaneous energy systems. Keywords: sustainab

The fragmented and complex nature of the regulation of resource exploration, extraction and production in Australia, coupled with the seemingly constant changing face of Australian politics in recent years, poses unique challenges for policy makers and industry alike, despite relatively free and open trade in natural resources. Addressing the nation’s energy security needs means balancing Australia’s interests as a major global energy exporter against domestic consumption requirements and pricing pressures while securing long-term energy sustainability. Australia’s current energy policy agenda, recently outlined in the federal government’s Energy White Paper, attempts to strike this balance, but does more in the way of demonstrating the challenges than addressing them.

Increasing energy demand, together with environmental concerns, results in a significant tendency toward the research and development of renewable systems and particularly solar energy. Locating in the sunbelt of earth, Iran has great solar potential. However, due to the noticeable amount of dust activities in the Middle East, there are several challenges in the way of development of the photovoltaic systems. The current article provides a comprehensive literature review on the photovoltaic status in Iran regarding the climate conditions, photovoltaic development potentials, energy policies within the country, and photovoltaic experiences. A regionally focused review of the conducted works is provided to investigate the effect of dust activities on the output performance of photovoltaic systems. A focus on dust origins, frequency, and specifications is a priority in order to analyze its impacts on the performance of photovoltaic systems. Furthermore, a review of cleaning methods to overcome the dust deposition problem is provided. The comprehensive literature review conducted in this article is represented to researchers, designers, and engineers dealing with photovoltaic systems in regions with dust problems such as the Middle East and particularly Iran.

It will be argued that there are major social gaps in the planning of complex energy infrastructure for public spaces: the first "gap" concerns the question if social acceptance can be reliably measured. The second “gap” refers to the lack of an integration of results from acceptance research into current planning procedures. Taking wind farm planning as an example, both social gaps are discussed and an integrative planning procedure is advocated. Finally, requirements for a user-centered planning process are formulated.

Will climate change stay below the 2 degree target in the 21st century on the basis of the COP 21 results? Looking into challenges and opportunities, this paper answers: To stay below the global 2dt is neither a real choice for the world society nor for businesses and civil societies in specific countries. It is a global guideline, scientifically developed for global negotiations, which should be broken down to national interests and actors. Key questions concerning the energy sector from the perspective of national interests are how to create and sustain a momentum for the inevitable energy transition, how to encourage disruptive innovations, avoid lock in effects, enable rapid deployment of energy efficiency and renewable energies etc. Or in other words: how to get to a competitive, economically benign, inclusive, low carbon and risk minimising energy system. With this background the paper argues that "burden sharing" is a misleading perception of strong climate mitigation strategies. It is more realistic to talk about "benefit sharing", using the monetary benefits and co-benefits of climate mitigation (e.g. energy cost savings, revenues from CO2-tax or emission trading systems) to help vulnerable national and international actors to adapt to the unavoidable climate risks. It has to be demonstrated on country level that the technologies and policy mix of strong climate mitigation and risk-minimising actions are indeed "benefit sharing" strategies which should be chosen anyhow, even if there was no climate change. For China and Germany this paper includes basic findings supporting this view. Bleibt nach den Beschlüssen von COP 21 der Klimawandel im 21. Jahrhundert unter dem 2 Grad Ziel? Dieses Papier argumentiert: Unter dem 2 Grad Ziel zu bleiben ist weder in globaler noch in nationaler Hinsicht ein reales Aktionsziel. Es handelt sich um eine globale Zielorientierung, die auf Basis bestmöglicher wissenschaftlicher Analysen für ein weltweites Klimaschutzregime entwickelt worden ist, aber auf nationale Interessen, Strategien und Akteure heruntergebrochen werden muss. Aus nationaler Perspektive ist zu fragen, wie eine Dynamik in Richtung der ohnehin notwendigen Transformation des Energiesystems erreicht werden kann: Wie können Innovationen ermutigt, Lock-in Effekte vermieden und die focierte Markteinführung von Effizienz und Erneuerbaren beschleunigt werden, um auf eine risikominimales Energiesystem rascher umzusteuern? Das Papier argumentiert, dass "Burden Sharing" eine irreführende Wahrnehmung dieses Transformationsprozesses darstellt. Es handelt sich vielmehr um einen komplexen Prozess des "Benefit Sharing", der mit einschließt, dass besonders verwundbaren Ländern und Akteuren die Anpassung an den unvermeidlichen Klimawandel erleichtert wird. Insofern gilt es nach COP 21 primär durch System- und Szenarienanalysen zu demonstrieren, dass nationale Strategien und Techniken des Klimaschutzes und der Risikominimierung ohnehin implementiert werden sollten, auch wenn es den Klimawandel nicht geben würde. Am Beispiel China und vor allem der Energiewende in Deutschland werden diese Thesen konkretisiert.

ISEBE : International Symposium of Environmental Biotechnology and Engineering, Mexico, MEX, -; Mexico City Metropolitan Area (MCMA) is the most populated urban area in the country. In 2010, MCMA required 14.8% of total energy domestic demand, but greenhouse gas emissions accounted for 7.7% of domestic emissions. Mexico has massive renewable energy potential that could be harnessed through solar photovoltaic (PV) technology. The problem to explore is the relationship between local and federal public strategies in MCMA and their stance on energy transition concern, social empowerment, new technology appropriation, and the will to boost social development and urban sustainability. A public policy typology was conducted through instruments of State intervention approach, based on political agenda articulation and environmental local interactions. Social equality is encouraged by means of forthright funding and in-kind support and energy policies focus on non-renewable energy subsidies and electric transmission infrastructure investment. There is a lack of vision for using PV technology as a guiding axis for marginalized population development. It is essential to promote economic and political rearrangement in order to level and structure environmental governance. It is essential to understand people's representation about their own needs along with renewable energy.

Human has always searched for higher living standards and greater power. Higher energy consumption, conversion, quality and efficiency have greatly served for the purpose with some consequences. Yet, the energy crisis in 1970s forced countries to take more imposing and complicated measures for energy saving and efficiency. For instance, the European Union set forward the 2010 Energy Performance of Buildings Directive legislation to lessen building energy consumption. The International Energy Agency (IEA) proposed its ‘25 Energy Efficiency Policy Recommendations’ in 2008 to save energy and to reduce annual CO2 emissions. Education and energy are two key concepts in people’s life. As schools play a significant role in education, they can play a similar role in energy consumption and education. Millions of students are enrolled in pre-primary, primary and secondary education around the world every year and countries spend significant amount of their GDP on education. It provides great opportunities to governments and schools to reduce energy consumption, save environment, and teach future generations the importance of building/following policies and standards through education as energy policy and education in schools have become an applying issue in today’s world and for the future. The aim of this article is to emphasize the importance of energy users’ behavior, school energy education and policies as building and implementing a school energy policy with the help of energy education and (inter)national standards can pay off not only within school areas but also nation-wide in the long run. Additionally, this article provides step-by-step energy policy guidance with a sample primary school energy policy for schools from the beginning and recommendations to raise school members’ energy awareness. DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2016.v6n2p183