Search Results (429)

Energy Geographies has a unique position at the intersection of geospatial and social science, and it now faces a defining methodological development with the rapid rise in Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI). This paper examines where GeoAI has and has not been applied within energy research through two bibliometric analyses using the Dimensions database. The first establishes an updated picture of energy geographies scholarship from 2020 to 2026, mapping the field’s current priorities and geographic distribution as a baseline for evaluating GeoAI’s role. The second conducts a bibliometric analysis of GeoAI-specific energy publications from 2020 to 2026, which reveals significant GeoAI Application Gaps: a heavy concentration in energy extraction and production research and in renewable energy siting and grid optimization, while energy transition, justice, and the energy problems of underrepresented regions remain substantially underserved. GeoAI energy research is also more geographically concentrated than the broader field, dominated by a small number of countries, raising questions about the applicability of these tools to the energy challenges facing the rest of the world. We argue that this gap reflects a pattern of problem selection as much as technological limitation, and that energy geographers are well positioned to redirect the development of this new field. We outline three directions for future research: developing Explainable GeoAI to ensure transparency and accountability, expanding geographic coverage to address data biases that favor a small set of well-resourced countries, and confronting the computational energy paradox of carbon-intensive AI applied to sustainability-oriented research. Full article

This qualitative research explores leadership as a daily, relational, and moral practice for school principals in Jordan, within a centralized education system subject to reform imperatives. Jordan is a compelling context for this research, given the centralized system, economic conditions, regional security, and constant reform imperatives. Principals must balance implementing national policy with the realities of their local communities while maintaining stability in their schools. This research, through semi-structured interviews and document analysis, seeks to explore how school principals in Jordan interpret, mediate, and translate policy into practice. This research found that leadership practice can be seen in physical presence, values-based decision-making, discretionary use of the “spirit of the law,” distributed responsibility, acts of care, and justice-based protection of human dignity. Preparedness for the future is not seen in formal strategies, but in daily practices that encourage flexibility, participation, and ethical responsibility. This research contributes a contextually grounded model of leadership practice under constraint, which has implications for leadership preparation, policy, reform in a centralized education system, and quality education. Full article

Large carnivore conservation (LCC) presents complex social–ecological challenges in environmental governance, yet limited research has examined how institutional design influences conservation outcomes. This study compares community-based conservation (CBC) in India’s tiger conservation with collaborative governance regimes (CGR) in Germany’s wolf conservation. We conducted a policy-network analysis using Net-Map interviews with formal policy actors involved in LCC governance (India: n = 21. Germany: n = 15). Network structures were analyzed across four tie categories—information-sharing, instructions, influence, and advice—while structural and perceived power distributions were compared across governance levels. Results show that information-sharing dominated governance interactions in both countries, whereas advice ties remained weak. India’s CBC exhibited ties concentrated largely within the forest department administration. Despite stronger local stakeholder integration, social justice framing affected direct inclusivity in policy decisions. Germany’s CGR demonstrated fragmented policy centers with most power concentrated at the German federal state levels. Environmental justice framing allows stronger influence by powerful non-state actors but alienates local stakeholders from policy decisions. Discrepancies between structural and perceived power were evident in both systems, highlighting participation–power disconnects within conservation governance. The findings suggest that effective and sustainable LCC governance requires stronger cross level coordination, institutionalized scientific advice mechanisms, and meaningful inclusion of local stakeholders in policy processes for sustainable LCC. Full article

Global urbanization and population aging urgently require cities to adapt to support older adults’ independence and well-being. While active mobility drives health and social equity, micro-scale proximity remains under-studied. This study evaluates ‘hyper-accessibility’ to essential daily services for older adults in Madrid and Munich, examining distributive spatial justice and its implications for healthy aging. Using quantitative spatial analysis, walking accessibility to seven key services was modeled at a strict 300 m threshold. These metrics were intersected with a sociodemographic disadvantage score to reveal urban disparities. Key findings expose structural contrasts. In Madrid, 50.82% of older adults achieve hyper-accessibility to daily services, though green areas (8.86%) and health facilities (15.82%) represent critical gaps. Conversely, Munich’s decentralized fabric yields hyper-accessibility for just 31.6% of seniors, with community centers (7.19%) and sports facilities (8.6%) being severely restricted. These spatial inequities highlight how restrictive walking thresholds function as invisible barriers to active mobility, isolating older populations. Ultimately, integrating hyper-accessibility metrics into local planning is vital for mitigating these baseline deficits and fostering age-inclusive, socially just urban environments. Full article

Peru’s tax dispute system—administrative claim, Tax Court appeal, and contentious-administrative review—has increasingly migrated toward electronic files, e-invoicing, interoperable databases, and data-driven oversight. This article examines whether artificial intelligence can reduce avoidable tax litigation without weakening taxpayers’ rights and identifies the institutional conditions required to reconcile administrative efficiency with due process, reason-giving, and effective contestation. Using a legal-doctrinal and policy-analytical design, the study analyzes Peru’s tax dispute architecture, digital evidence environment, and AI-related risks in compliance and administrative litigation. The findings show that only bounded decision-support applications are institutionally appropriate, including audit triage, anomaly detection, document classification, workflow prioritization, compliance assistance, and consistency checks, provided that they do not replace legally attributable human judgment. AI is compatible with digital tax justice only when six safeguards are institutionalized: legally meaningful explainability, evidentiary and computational traceability, meaningful human oversight with override authority, lifecycle auditability, effective contestation, and distributional equality. The analysis further demonstrates that facially neutral digital requirements and risk models may generate unequal effects when disparities in connectivity, digital literacy, record-keeping capacity, and access to professional assistance translate into differences in audit exposure, compliance costs, evidentiary burdens, and practical contestability. The article proposes a rights-compatible framework for AI-supported tax enforcement in Peru. Full article

Energy communities (ECs) are becoming a key institutional instrument for decentralizing the European energy transition, yet their implementation remains constrained by fragmented legal interpretation, uneven national transposition, and unresolved socio-technical coordination problems. This review synthesizes the peer-reviewed literature, EU primary legal texts, and national legislation to clarify the distinction between Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) and Citizen Energy Communities (CECs), alongside the amendment relationship between the RED II and RED III directives. The analysis demonstrates that the scalability of these initiatives depends less on theoretical legal recognition and more on aligning operational frameworks, including metering, settlement, cybersecurity, and equitable allocation rules. The Romanian case illustrates this challenge clearly: rapid prosumer growth creates valuable distributed generation but also exposes physical grid constraints, asymmetric socio-economic participation capacity, and weak experience with cooperative energy governance. To address these vulnerabilities, this paper contributes a focused analytical framework linking energy justice, peer-to-peer game-theoretic modeling, and the strategic integration of “anchor-prosumers.” The study argues that larger renewable self-consumers can act as stabilizing community anchors when internal energy prices are designed between wholesale export values and retail import prices, thereby improving both producer incentives and consumer affordability. Future research developments, including targeted surveys and longitudinal empirical validations, will sustain this claim and optimize the socio-economic resilience of decentralized energy markets. Full article

Ensuring equitable access to urban green spaces is a major challenge in contemporary urban planning, with important implications for public health, well-being and environmental justice. However, comparative cross-city analyses based on harmonised methodologies remain limited, particularly across contrasting European climatic and morphological contexts. This study aims to: (i) assess the spatial distribution of public green spaces; (ii) evaluate neighbourhood-level accessibility and identify environmental justice inequalities; and (iii) examine how urban form and climatic context influence accessibility outcomes across the following three medium-sized European cities: Faro (Portugal), Tartu (Estonia) and Nitra (Slovakia). A GIS-based approach was applied using consistent criteria, including publicly accessible green spaces ≥ 1 ha, Euclidean buffers of 300 m and 500 m, and harmonised population data from the Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL). Accessibility was quantified as the proportion of residents living within the defined walking-distance thresholds. The results reveal substantial inter- and intra-urban disparities. Tartu exhibits the highest green space provision (23.34 m²/inhabitant), while Faro presents the lowest (5.67 m²/inhabitant). However, accessibility patterns do not directly reflect provision levels: Faro achieves accessibility values at 500 m comparable to those of Tartu, whereas Nitra shows lower accessibility despite moderate provision. These findings demonstrate that accessibility is shaped primarily by the spatial configuration of green spaces rather than by overall provision alone. The study highlights the importance of integrating urban morphology and climatic context into environmental justice assessments and urban green infrastructure planning in order to reduce spatial inequalities in access to urban nature. Full article

Socio-spatial inequality remains a defining feature of climate vulnerability in South Africa, where historically formed patterns of segregation continue to shape uneven access to infrastructure, services, and environmental resources. This study presents a narrative review of how historical spatial planning has structured persistent disparities in exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity across urban and rural landscapes. Evidence from the literature demonstrates that apartheid-era spatial planning established durable inequalities in water and sanitation provision, green infrastructure distribution, and proximity to environmental hazards, which continue to influence contemporary climate risk profiles. These inequalities are further reinforced through socio-economic stratification, particularly in the context of energy transitions, where access to private renewable energy systems is concentrated among wealthier households, while poorer communities remain dependent on unstable public electricity infrastructure. The review also incorporates land and soil systems as critical but often minimized dimensions of vulnerability, showing how soil degradation and unequal access to productive land contribute to livelihood insecurity and reinforce rural and peri-urban marginalization. In addition, emerging responses such as just transition frameworks, grassroots environmental justice movements, and energy democracy initiatives are examined with regard to the structural constraints that limit their effectiveness in addressing entrenched inequalities. Overall, the analysis highlights that climate vulnerability in South Africa is deeply embedded in historical and ongoing socio-spatial and socio-economic inequalities that continue to shape differentiated environmental outcomes. Full article

This study integrates spatial justice theory with the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework to construct a new analytical model: “Institutional Rules–Spatial Justice Issues–Spatial Injustice Perception–Institutional Feedback.” Using Shangri-La Potatso National Park as a case study, our deductive–inductive approach reveals the practical dilemmas and institutional challenges in the development of China’s national park system. The findings indicate that (1) national park reforms have not restructured entrenched power relations, leading to ineffective governance and deficiencies across multiple institutional rules; (2) these rule deficiencies shape an action arena where multiple actors interact within nested power networks, generating four interrelated spatial justice issues—power deviance, resource deprivation, cultural erosion, and conflict reproduction; (3) actors’ perceptions of spatial injustice, assessed through procedural, distributive, recognitional, and restorative justice lenses, produce institutional feedback that often perpetuates rather than resolves systemic inequities. Theoretically, this study reveals that while spatial justice issues manifest differently in ecological conservation versus urban development contexts, both are driven by institutional exclusion constructed through a “capital–power–technology” alliance. In practical terms, an inclusive governance system centered on collaborative decision-making, equitable resource allocation, cultural recognition, and integrated conflict resolution is proposed to advance spatial justice. Full article

Richard J. Arneson’s theory of welfare underwent a significant transformation from subjectivism to objectivism. Three difficulties—adaptive preferences, false beliefs, and non-prudential desires—demonstrate that a welfare theory grounded in subjective attitudes is untenable in principle, driving Arneson toward an objective list theory. Through his rejection of the endorsement constraint, he established a purely objectivist position: subjective attitudes are “neither necessary nor sufficient” for well-being. This position generates significant justificatory pressure toward hard paternalism. Arneson confronted this consequence by arguing that hard paternalism is defensible in principle, while contending that paternalistic intervention must remain restrained in practice on grounds of the intrinsic value of autonomy, the limitations of state capacity, and the costs of stigmatization. However, the reasons Arneson offers for restraint cannot be adequately supported by the objective list alone; they face explanatory pressure at the level of political application. Conditional objectivism can better fill this explanatory gap: for an item on the objective list to count as contributing to a particular individual’s well-being, a negative condition must be satisfied—namely, that the individual would not rationally reject the item under conditions of reflective deliberation. Full article

The 3-30-300 rule, proposed by Cecil Konijnendijk, is oriented towards the design of greener cities. However, subsequent literature has revealed some application limits due to overly simple definitions (visibility of 3 trees), fixed thresholds (30% tree cover) and theoretical distances (300 m to the park) that do not consider ecological quality, real green area proximity and possible socio-demographic differences. The present research attempts to overcome these limitations through the elaboration of a scalable composite index that, starting from the original rule, integrates ecological, infrastructural and population variables to give a more robust measure of the availability and usability of urban green. The index was tested in the study area of the urban centre of Ferrara (Italy). Three sub-indices were calculated for each building: Indicator 3—Visibility (I3), Indicator 30—Tree cover (I30), and Indicator 300—Green area proximity (I300). Once normalized and weighted, the three indicators were aggregated into a composite index conceived as a scalable and replicable framework adaptable to diverse urban settings. By spatially integrating population data, the methodology explicitly embeds the distributional dimension of climate justice, supporting evidence-based adaptation strategies and equitable urban regeneration policies. Moving beyond the binary logic of the original 3-30-300 rule, the approach provides an operational decision-support tool to detect intra-urban inequalities, to address just green transitions and to monitor urban greening interventions over time. Full article

This study proposes a comprehensive techno-economic methodology to assess the economic viability and optimal sizing of grid-connected residential photovoltaic (PV) self-consumption systems without storage in emerging economies. The model uses net present value (NPV) as the optimization criterion and estimates internal rate of return (IRR) and discounted payback time (DPBT) as complementary profitability indicators. It integrates hourly PV generation, synthesized hourly demand profiles, local tariff structures, surplus-energy remuneration, investment and operating costs, inflation, performance losses, and discount-rate assumptions, while explicitly accounting for context-specific limitations related to data availability, storage-free operation, and financing assumptions. The methodology is applied to 30 Colombian residential scenarios, covering five cities and six socioeconomic strata, and is complemented with a replicability case in Jaén, Spain. In Colombia, PV self-consumption is economically viable in all cases, but profitability is highly uneven: maximized NPV ranges from 2.8 € in the least favorable low-income case to 2816 € in the best high-income case, IRR ranges from 5.0% to 14.7%, and DPBT ranges from 8 to 24 years. From an energy-justice perspective, tariff subsidies improve affordability but may reduce PV attractiveness for low-income users, highlighting the need for capital grants, low-interest loans, or community solar schemes. Full article

Due to global change and the associated increase in climate hazards, the study of ecosystem services and their potential to reduce disaster risk has gained relevance in recent years. However, access to ecosystem services is not evenly distributed, leading to environmental injustice. Currently, there is no commonly accepted approach to simultaneously integrate ecosystem services and environmental justice into the risk assessment equation (risk = hazard × exposure × vulnerability). In this study, a framework was developed that integrates ecosystem service assessment into the vulnerability component using InVEST models, which was applied to the case study of Valencia, Spain. The approach applied here not only allowed visualising risk reduction through ecosystem services but also identified a robust synergy between heatwave and flood mitigation as well as mismatches between socioeconomic vulnerability and ecosystem service provision, with foreign residents being at a disadvantage in Valencia. The practical application of this framework in urban planning was shown by comparing the results of the risk assessment of the existing land use conditions with three hypothetical future scenarios. The results support the current municipal ambitions of urban greening in Valencia, while highlighting the need to consider socioeconomic vulnerability in decision-making. Full article

Although apartheid ended in 1994, its legacy continues to shape South Africa’s higher education system, reinforcing disparities in access, funding, and representation. This study aims to critically examine how apartheid diplomacy has influenced higher education and asks: how do its strategies continue to shape academic practices, institutional relationships, and systemic inequalities in post-apartheid South Africa? It conceptualises apartheid diplomacy as the use of education to entrench racial hierarchies, reproduce class domination, and suppress indigenous knowledge. Grounded in Marxist and Weberian class theories and Crenshaw’s intersectionality framework, the analysis traces how apartheid-era policies institutionalised systemic inequalities and how these legacies persist within institutions. A scoping review was conducted using five databases (EMBASE, APA PsycINFO, Cochrane Library, CINAHL, and Scopus) between January 2007 and April 2025, guided by PRISMA ScR and Arksey and O’Malley’s six-stage framework. Of 75 articles retrieved, 15 met the inclusion criteria. Findings reveal that apartheid diplomacy shaped academic governance, resource distribution, and knowledge production, leaving enduring inequities despite ongoing reforms. Transformation efforts, including financial aid schemes, equity policies, and curriculum debates, have achieved progress but remain constrained by structural, cultural, and intersectional barriers. The study underscores that achieving lasting equity requires continuous policy interventions, inclusive leadership, and curriculum decolonisation, alongside advocacy and interdisciplinary research. It reframes higher education as a diplomatic arena where equity and epistemic justice are negotiated, offering an original lens for understanding and dismantling apartheid’s enduring influence on South African academia. Full article

Despite accounting for less than 0.03% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, the Pacific Small Island Developing States (PSIDS) face existential threats to their environment, livelihoods, and regional stability due to their heavy dependence on imported fossil fuels and disproportionate climate vulnerability. To address this “Justice Paradox,” this study utilises a Nexus Mapping framework to qualitatively synthesise the non-linear causal pathways between climate stressors and energy system vulnerabilities. Through an integrative thematic synthesis of literature and regional policy documents, the research identifies systemic bottlenecks, including the “fiscal trap” of post-disaster reconstruction, the “demand-utility paradox” of rising temperatures, and the logistical premiums of archipelagic energy distribution. The analysis suggests that energy decarbonisation represents a strategic opportunity to strengthen climate security across four dimensions: human, national, international, and ecological. To facilitate a secure transition, the study proposes a comprehensive “policy mix” of regulatory standards (sticks), economic de-risking through mechanisms such as Sovereign Green Bonds (carrots), and the institutionalisation of local technical sovereignty (sermons). This research offers an interpretive analytical framework for Pacific policymakers, arguing that decentralised, modular renewables may serve as a strategic shield against climatic instability and support the preservation of regional statehood. Full article