Dear Colleagues,

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been built on the successes of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and are a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity. One of the features that makes SDGs unique compared to MDGs is the need for integrated planning by taking into consideration the interlinkage characteristics of targets. Energy is the key enabler for any development, as it increases productivity, transforms economies and societies, and improves human life, and eventually it enables all types of development in a country as well as globally. Therefore, the achievement of SDGs by 2030 will not be possible without ensuring that the goal for energy (SDG7) is successfully achieved. Additionally, the interlinkages between energy (i.e., SDG7) and the other SDGs will impact on the energy demand as well as the choice of energy resources.

Integrated energy seeks to support the achievement of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development including SDG7, in connection with the aforementioned interlinkage mechanisms, and emission reduction under NDCs. Under the SDGs scenario, the energy plans will need to consider the target levels for all SDGs and estimate the additional energy demand arising from these SDG targets. The existing gap between academic research and developing policy instruments at a national level is widening further, with a rapidly changing energy and emissions landscape due to fresh global commitments and agreements. The global research community is struggling to keep up with the continuously evolving national and global developments that are necessary to align the energy sector to cater future goals, e.g., the 2-degree target. This Special Issue thus aims to attract researches to fill in this gap and foster evidence-based policy development at a national and a global scale to achieve both SDGs and emission reduction targets by 2030 and beyond.

Therefore, the critical issues that need to be addressed are as follows:

1. SDGs-responsive energy planning through an integrated approach;
2. A cost-effective approach to increasing the share of renewable energy;
3. The reduction of energy intensity across economic sectors;
4. The synergies between renewable energy and energy efficiency to optimize the share of renewable energy in final energy consumption;
5. Energy systems modelling and optimization to achieve SDG7 targets and emission reduction under the Paris Agreement;
6. Identifying and mainstreaming the impacts of interlinkages between energy and other SDGs into energy planning.

Dr. Tania Urmee
Dr. Anis Zaman
Guest Editors

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• Renewable and sustainable energy
• Emission reduction
• Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs)
• Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
• Interlinkages
• Paris agreement
• 2- and 1.5-degree pathways
• Integrated energy planning
• Energy transition