Search Results (130)

Background: Corporate energy transition can create efficiency, financing, and valuation benefits, but it also exposes firms to implementation, information, and transition risks. This study examines whether digital transformation helps firms convert energy-transition strategies into financial value. Unlike prior studies that mainly treated digitalization or sustainability as broad direct predictors, this study examines an implementation-based, multidimensional digital capability as a boundary condition across three distinct energy-transition strategies and both accounting- and market-based financial outcomes. Methods: Using an unbalanced panel of 30 firms associated with Indonesia’s LQ45 Low Carbon Leaders Index (120 firm years, 2020–2025), we construct a 30-item implementation-based Digital Transformation Index and estimate two-way fixed-effects models with firm-level wild-cluster-bootstrap inference, conditional marginal effects, false-discovery-rate adjustment, and prespecified robustness checks. Results: Clean energy use is positively associated with return on assets, return on equity, and Tobin’s Q. Low-carbon operational efficiency is most clearly associated with return on assets, whereas renewable energy use is primarily reflected in Tobin’s Q. Digital transformation is positively associated with all three outcomes and selectively strengthens the financial effects of the three transition strategies. Conclusions: Digital transformation is not a universal performance amplifier. It functions as a strategy- and outcome-specific value-conversion and risk-management capability that improves the monitoring, coordination, financing, verification, and communication of energy-transition investments. Full article

Offshore wind energy is rapidly emerging as a pivotal technology for global decarbonization and energy security, particularly in emerging markets with vast maritime resources like Brazil. This article presents a comprehensive and integrative literature review that evaluates the socio-environmental impacts of offshore wind while simultaneously analyzing its strategic role in providing “Capacity Value” and systemic security to the Brazilian Power System. Unlike onshore wind, offshore resources in Brazil exhibit superior technical characteristics, with capacity factors reaching up to 67% and a strong countercyclical complementarity with hydrological regimes. These features allow offshore wind to reliably contribute to meeting peak demand and reducing power deficits, quantified through metrics such as Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) and Firm Energy Certificates. However, the expansion of the sector brings complex socio-environmental challenges, including impacts on marine biodiversity, disruptions to artisanal fisheries, and a high reliance on critical minerals. The analysis reveals that current licensing frameworks in Brazil, although evolving with the enactment of Law No. 15,097/2025, still face gaps in cumulative impact assessment and participatory governance. The article concludes by proposing a “dual-track” governance approach that integrates Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) with supply-adequacy requirements. By aligning technical optimization with biodiversity safeguards and social equity, Brazil can foster a sustainable offshore wind sector that acts as a reliable pillar for its long-term energy transition. Full article

This study examines the determinants of conditional volatility in energy-sector equity returns and their implications for sustainable energy resilience, energy security, and investment stability. Using a multi-stage econometric framework, the analysis investigates how global financial, commodity, and macroeconomic shocks are transmitted to volatility dynamics across heterogeneous energy companies. The dataset includes domestic and international firms, enabling a comparative assessment of volatility behavior and risk-transmission mechanisms under different market and institutional conditions. The empirical framework combines ARMA models for return dynamics, EGARCH/GARCH specifications for conditional volatility estimation, and OLS regressions with HAC standard errors to identify key determinants of volatility, including market indices, commodity prices, exchange rates, and major geopolitical and economic events. The findings reveal strong volatility persistence across all assets and asymmetric responses to market shocks in most cases. Global market conditions, particularly lagged MSCI World returns, significantly affect volatility, whereas commodity effects related to oil, gas, and coal remain heterogeneous across firms. Event-based regressors show that systemic shocks, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the European energy crisis, increase volatility, although geopolitical effects depend on firm-specific exposure. The results contribute to the sustainability literature by linking energy-sector financial volatility with market resilience, energy security, and stable investment conditions for the energy transition. Full article

Consumer electronics are important for global energy use, material extraction, and toxic exposures. Within consumer behavior, End-of-Current-Use (EoCU) decisions (e.g., to resell, donate, recycle, or throw away) particularly are a planetary health concern, not just a waste management problem. The goal of this work is to inform interventions that nudge users toward more sustainable and data-secure choices. We surveyed 4000 U.S. users on their attitudes, knowledge, and planned EoCU choices, and constructed a Random Forest model to simulate planned behavior as a function of reported knowledge and attitudes. The key result is identification of behavioral “tipping points”, i.e., incremental shifts in knowledge or attitude that produce large changes in sustainable behavior. For example, moving the level of agreement relating to “reselling is worthwhile” from “Neutral” to “Agree” increases the probability of resale by 26%, with stronger agreement yielding minimal further gains, suggesting relatively small changes in perception may thus produce large behavioral changes. The model also identifies trade-offs, with increases in agreeing that resale is worthwhile leading to to decreases in giving away (−14%) and recycling (−10%). Economic considerations drive reselling decisions, while environmental concerns drive recycling. Identifying these critical thresholds enables efficient intervention design, as modest attitude changes at transition points may prove more effective than maximizing positive attitudes. These finding challenge assumptions of linearity of behavioral responses, informing circular economy and other policies. They also relate to managing planetary health issues raised by EoCU electronics, such as human and ecological well being, digital equity, and environmental justice. The framework is broadly applicable to identifying behavioral tipping points in other domains, e.g., healthcare, energy efficiency, and data security. Full article

Physical infrastructure failure induces topological phase transitions in financial networks that existing systemic risk models cannot detect, attribute, or govern. This study introduces CASCADEnt (Cascading Systemic-Entropy-Detecting Network), a physics-informed entropy protocol for infrastructure-coupled financial hypergraphs. The model integrates three components: (i) a Landauer-motivated entropy threshold ($S^{\ast }=2.852$ nats) that detects imminent metabolic arrest before it manifests as market stress; (ii) Gradient-Boosted Integrated Gradients (GB-IG) metabolic centrality that attributes systemic collapse to the specific apex nodes driving it; and (iii) a Lyapunov-constrained Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman protocol that governs macroprudential intervention with deterministic stability tendency under a linear control assumption (Theorem 1); stochastic extensions remain future work. The key variables are daily equity returns and hypergraph topology for 19 JSE Top40 securities, integrated with Eskom Energy Availability Factor (EAF) telemetry and CBOE VIX ($T=2838$ trading days, January 2015–April 2026). CASCADEnt achieves F1 = 0.643 at a 96 h early-warning lead time, outperforming all advance-warning baselines by 23.6 percentage points, with a false alarm rate of zero across 553 out-of-distribution days. Twelve apex nodes concentrate 85.5% of total system entropy, providing a governance target for macroprudential capital buffer design in infrastructure-dependent emerging economies. Full article

This study poses the following research question: Where and how can low- to medium-enthalpy geothermal resources in Northern México be harnessed to promote a territorially anchored, socially inclusive energy transition? Hence, the potential contribution of geothermal direct uses to sustainable local development in Sonora—one of México’s largest and most economically diverse states—is examined in this article. In Sonora, a semi-arid region with dispersed populations and underutilized geothermal resources, the research integrates spatial analysis and socio-territorial indicators to identify areas where geothermal direct uses can deliver inclusive development benefits. Thermal data of 88 thermal springs and 36 wellbores were examined, in which in situ temperatures and geothermal gradients were found from 30 to 80 °C and 20–200 °C/km, respectively. This resulted in a catalog of 28 direct uses based on the energy needs and demands of the population near the sites. Then, a composite methodological framework was developed that combined the Geothermal Suitability Index (GSI), the Socio-Productive Energy Demand Index (SPEDI), and the Territorial Vulnerability Index (TVI). These indices and the catalog were overlaid to detect municipalities where high geothermal potential, energy needs, and social vulnerability intersect. Results show that sites such as Bacadehuachi, Cajeme, and Fronteras offer high-priority opportunities for agri-food processing, aquaculture, and heating/cooling applications. The findings contribute to broader debates on rural energy access, energy justice, and decentralized planning, providing evidence-based guidance for policy design that aligns renewable energy deployment with regional equity and resilience goals. Full article

Nickel has become a strategic mineral for the energy transition, yet its supply chain is increasingly shaped by a compound risk regime involving resource nationalism, processing concentration, geopolitical compliance rules, carbon-footprint requirements, and commodity-market volatility. This study develops NiChain-LLM-ABM, a large-language-model-empowered agent-based model for simulating nickel supply chain resilience under semantically rich policy shocks. The framework uses a policy semantic parsing module to transform official policy texts into structured shock parameters, a multi-agent strategy generation module to represent adaptive decisions by seven agent classes, a calibrated supply chain network module to simulate material, financial, and information flows, and a four-dimensional resilience assessment module. The model is anchored in observed nickel production, price, trade, and technology data from USGS, IEA, UN Comtrade, LME, and official legal sources, and its scenario outputs are generated through 100 Monte Carlo replications over 2025–2035. Results show that the baseline Comprehensive Resilience Index (CRI) declines from 0.620 in 2025 to 0.547 in 2035. Indonesian policy tightening causes the sharpest near-term deterioration, with CRI falling to 0.445 in 2028 and the simulated supply deficit reaching 24.5 kt Ni equivalent. A geopolitical compliance shock produces the lowest terminal resilience (CRI = 0.472 in 2035). A green-compliance scenario is disruptive in the short run but exceeds the baseline by 2035, while a coordinated policy portfolio raises the terminal CRI to 0.744, a 36.0% improvement over the baseline. Compared with a conventional rule-based ABM, the LLM-ABM reduces extreme-event backcasting error by 57%, improves policy-response fidelity by 53%, and more than doubles agent heterogeneity differentiation. The results support portfolio-based critical-mineral governance combining strategic reserves, overseas equity investment, recycling, technology substitution, and international cooperation. Full article

This study investigates whether FinTech thematic assets achieve dynamic variance reduction for regional ESG market risk under clean-energy equity stress regimes, using daily data from March 2019 to August 2024 across five S&P ESG LargeMidCap markets spanning developed and emerging economies (North America, Europe, Asia Pacific Developed, Latin America Emerging, and Asia Pacific Emerging). Employing a DCC-GARCH framework with GJR-GARCH univariate specifications across four S&P Kensho FinTech channels—Democratized Banking, Alternative Finance, Future Payments, and Distributed Ledger—we estimate time-varying correlations and hedging effectiveness, and assess safe-haven properties via the Baur–Lucey framework. The most robust finding is that North America ESG shows the strongest dynamic variance reduction (59–76%), improving further during high clean-energy equity stress regimes (p < 0.01, bootstrap permutation test); Asia Pacific Developed ESG shows the weakest (7–9%) despite its developed-market status, while Latin America Emerging ESG’s comparatively high variance reduction (28–40%) is tempered by residual ARCH effects that point to incompletely modeled volatility rather than structural hedging capacity. All FinTech channels remain positive diversifiers rather than safe havens across every market and regime. Hedging capacity thus tracks market-specific volatility and correlation dynamics rather than a simple developed–emerging divide. The analysis is bounded by a single five-year sample window and two transition-risk proxies, warranting continued monitoring as FinTech and ESG regulatory frameworks evolve. Full article

The rapid transformation of urban centers into smart environments introduces complex challenges at the intersection of technological advancement, environmental stewardship, and social justice. This study evaluates Lisbon’s smart city transition by establishing an integrated framework that links digital equity with Environmental, Social, and Governance principles. Employing a convergent qualitative research design, this paper triangulates a comprehensive regulatory policy analysis with primary empirical data gathered from twenty-five semi-structured interviews with municipal officials, academic experts, and residents of marginalized communities. The findings expose critical systemic disparities in digital infrastructure deployment, device affordability, and platform literacy across socio-economic strata, demonstrating how localized digital divides directly impede the execution of urban ESG objectives. While green financing mechanisms offer robust pathways for sustainable energy and transit infrastructure, their equity outcomes remain constrained without mandatory, transparent information disclosure systems that mitigate agency costs. Cultivating urban resilience requires shifting from tokenistic e-governance to genuine citizen empowerment. This study offers a novel theoretical contribution by operationalizing corporate ESG metrics within public urban governance frameworks, providing an empirical roadmap for municipal policymakers globally to balance digital innovation with structural inclusion and environmental accountability in smart city agendas. Full article

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Prosperity Cluster (SDGs 7–11) represents a multidimensional framework linking economic growth, social inclusion, environmental sustainability, and resilient development. This review critically examines the interconnections among Affordable and Clean Energy (SDG 7), Decent Work and Economic Growth (SDG 8), Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure (SDG 9), Reduced Inequalities (SDG 10), and Sustainable Cities and Communities (SDG 11), with the aim of exploring how these goals collectively contribute to sustainable prosperity. Adopting a structured literature review methodology informed by PRISMA principles, the study synthesizes peer-reviewed and gray literature collected from major academic databases and institutional sources. The findings indicate that progress toward the prosperity-oriented SDGs remains uneven across regions due to disparities in governance quality, technological capacity, infrastructure development, and social inclusion. Renewable energy transitions, digital innovation, circular economy initiatives, green infrastructure, and sustainable urban planning emerge as critical drivers of long-term prosperity, while inequality, weak institutional coordination, inadequate human-capital investment, and uneven access to technology remain major barriers. The review further demonstrates that progress in one SDG strongly influences outcomes in others, emphasizing the importance of integrated and policy-coherent approaches rather than isolated sectoral actions. Conceptually, the paper advances the understanding of the “Prosperity Cluster” by positioning dynamism, equity, and environmental stewardship as mutually reinforcing dimensions of sustainable development. The study concludes that achieving sustainable prosperity requires governance systems capable of balancing economic competitiveness with environmental responsibility and social justice. Greater international cooperation, inclusive policymaking, and investment in resilient infrastructure and human capital are essential to ensure that prosperity benefits present and future generations without leaving vulnerable populations behind. Full article

This study, through a hybrid approach to post-occupancy evaluation (POE) of four types of high-energy-efficiency housing in rural Scotland, explores the manifestation, formation mechanism, and mitigation pathways of energy risks in high-energy-efficiency housing from environmental and socioeconomic dimensions. The findings reveal a “high-efficiency paradox”: better fabric performance and lower heating demand do not guarantee reduced carbon emissions, fuel poverty alleviation, or energy resilience. Actual energy risks are formed by the combined effects of multiple factors, including building size, energy infrastructure, resident characteristics, energy prices, and policy, exhibiting a clear systemic coupling characteristic. The study further verifies that, in the context of rural Scotland, relying solely on indicators such as EPC may lead to misjudgements of housing sustainability. Heating demand, total energy consumption, carbon emissions, and energy expenditure exhibit a partially decoupled relationship. Thus, rural housing sustainability should shift from a technically efficient approach to a comprehensive strategy integrating design, infrastructure, affordability, and social equity. The study proposes context-specific mitigation pathways including multi-source energy systems, place-sensitive policies, socio-economic support, and a multi-criteria assessment framework, providing empirical references for rural housing energy transition and energy risk governance. Full article

Against the backdrop of global carbon neutrality, the cross-regional allocation of green electricity is pivotal for energy transition, yet its impact on inclusive economic growth and regional equity remains contentious. This study addresses the spatial welfare mismatch arising from large-scale power transmission in China. Utilizing provincial panel data from 2006 to 2022 and employing the staggered rollout of Ultra-High Voltage (UHV) lines as a quasi-natural experiment, we apply advanced econometric models, including CS-DID and Bartik instrumental variables, to identify causal effects. Empirical results reveal an asymmetric “cost-benefit separation” effect: while green electricity imports significantly bolster high-quality development (HQD) in eastern recipient regions, exports exert a drag on western provinces by triggering capital outflow, profit deprivation, and ecological load. Consequently, regional HQD gaps exhibit divergence rather than convergence. However, we find that fiscal ecological compensation acts as a critical moderating buffer, effectively reversing this trend and driving conditional convergence and sustainable regional development. Heterogeneity analysis further indicates that market-oriented electricity reforms and “East Data, West Computing” infrastructure mitigate these negative externalities. These findings underscore the necessity of shifting from a purely engineering-focused transmission model to an institutional framework centered on energy justice, offering actionable insights for achieving SDG 7 and SDG 10 synergies. Full article

Water scarcity in Peru is increasingly shaped by competing sectoral demands, particularly between large-scale mining and agriculture. Both sectors rely heavily on limited freshwater resources in arid coastal and Andean basins, generating complex trade-offs between economic productivity, environmental sustainability, and social equity. This review synthesizes and critically evaluates current knowledge on water footprint (WF) dynamics within mining–agriculture systems, integrating hydrosocial theory, water–energy–food nexus thinking, and sustainability transition frameworks. Mining activities in Peru are characterized by high blue and grey water footprints, associated with intensive extraction processes and contamination risks, while agriculture exhibits diverse water footprints depending on crop type, irrigation efficiency, and climatic conditions. The interaction of these sectors creates hydrosocial conflicts driven by unequal water allocation, environmental degradation, and institutional fragmentation. This paper identifies key drivers of conflict and evaluates emerging pathways for sustainability transitions, including technological innovation, nature-based solutions, and participatory governance mechanisms. An integrative conceptual framework derived from a thematic synthesis of the reviewed literature is proposed. The findings provide actionable insights for policymakers and researchers seeking to reconcile economic development with water sustainability in resource-constrained environments. Full article

This study investigates whether financial sector development, and, critically, which dimension of it, is associated with the dual energy transition across eleven Southeast Asian economies over 2004–2020. The empirical strategy combines Pooled OLS with Driscoll–Kraay standard errors, two-way fixed effects, Pooled Mean Group ARDL error correction, and Method-of-Moments quantile regression. The results reveal a stark asymmetry: the Financial Institutions Index is positively and robustly associated with clean cooking access across all estimators. Quantile regressions confirm that the FI association with clean cooking is significant across the entire distribution, with the largest coefficients at the lower quantiles. Sub-sample analysis reveals that the FI–clean cooking relationship is especially pronounced in the frontier Cambodia–Lao PDR–Myanmar–Vietnam–Timor-Leste group, where within-country fixed effects yield a coefficient of 257.54 (p < 0.01). Although these associations do not establish strict causality, the findings are consistent with prioritising deepening institutional banking and digital financial inclusion rather than equity-market development as the primary financial-sector channel associated with lower energy poverty in Southeast Asia, although such policy directions require further micro-level validation. Full article

Climate change and low-carbon transition policies affect sustainable development by changing firms’ financing costs and investors’ capital allocation. This paper investigates whether and how climate-related information is priced in China’s equity market, focusing on firm-level carbon intensity and exposure to climate policy uncertainty (CPU). First, univariate-sorted portfolio tests confirm the existence of a carbon premium, as firms with high carbon intensity earn significantly higher average returns. However, the unconditional relation between CPU exposure and stock returns is insignificant. Bivariate-sorted portfolios reveal a strong interaction between the carbon premium and the CPU premium. The carbon premium is higher for firms with high exposure to CPU, whereas a significant and negative CPU premium appears among low-carbon firms and, in sector-level tests, is concentrated in non-energy firms. Further analysis demonstrates clear differences between energy and non-energy sectors, which may be attributable to cash flow risks and uncertainty in growth options. The findings contribute to climate-related asset pricing and sustainable finance research by showing that transition-risk pricing depends on the interaction between carbon exposure and policy uncertainty. Full article