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Residential buildings account for a substantial share of global energy consumption and carbon emissions. This study proposes a climate-responsive multi-objective optimisation framework for identifying optimal low-carbon residential building designs across eight representative climate zones in Central Africa. The framework combines EnergyPlus building energy simulations with the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II to simultaneously minimise energy consumption, initial investment cost, and operational carbon emissions while satisfying comfort constraints. To further evaluate the economic viability of the optimised solutions, carbon tax and public subsidy scenarios were introduced. The optimised sustainable configurations achieved energy savings of 53.13–59.85% relative to the reference buildings, while photovoltaic integration enabled net-negative operational carbon emissions across all climate zones. The resulting solutions required initial investments of 233.90–295.01 USD/m², generated life-cycle benefits (LCB) of 28.45–54.81 USD/m², achieved levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) of 0.06–0.10 USD/kWh, and exhibited payback periods (PBP) of 14–18 years. Under public subsidy scenarios, LCB increased substantially, LCOE decreased to 0.03–0.05 USD/kWh, and PBP was reduced to 6–9 years. These findings demonstrate that integrating climate-responsive design optimisation with policy-based economic incentives provides an effective decision-support framework for balancing energy efficiency, affordability, and carbon mitigation, offering practical guidance for low-carbon residential development in Central Africa. Full article

Operational redundancies in Nigeria’s airport logistics, including duplicated clearance procedures, fragmented data systems, and repeated physical inspections, generate substantial inefficiencies that hamper service delivery, increase costs, and raise sustainability concerns. Despite growing interest in blockchain technology (BCT) as a logistics innovation, empirical evidence from Sub-Saharan African aviation contexts is largely limited. This study examines how stakeholders perceive BCT as a potential mechanism for reducing procedural, informational, and structural redundancies across Nigerian airport operations. A qualitative research design was employed, drawing on 45 semi-structured interviews with airport managers, airline officials, regulatory bodies, and aviation experts. Data were analyzed using Leximancer, yielding eight thematic clusters across 115 concepts. To augment thematic rigor, three quantitative measures—Normalized Pointwise Mutual Information (NPMI), Jaccard similarity, and degree centrality—were applied to the exported Concept Co-occurrence Matrix (CCMatrix; 6555 pairwise relationships). The blockchain theme exhibited the highest intra-theme cohesion (mean NPMI = 0.615) and the second highest normalized centrality (0.638), suggesting that it functions as a semantically tight, cross-cutting concept in participants’ discourse. The strongest concept pair, inefficiency–reliability (NPMI = 0.989; Jaccard = 0.909), is consistent with participants’ recurring association of service failures with procedurally generated redundancies. Stakeholders perceived BCT as potentially addressing these redundancies through shared ledger architectures, smart contract automation, and consolidated identity management, with anticipated sustainability co-benefits across energy, documentation and processing domains. The study offers an exploratory, contextualized application of the Technology–Organization–Environment (TOE) framework, the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), and the Dynamic Capabilities Framework (DCF) to a resource-constrained developing-country aviation context and proposes a stakeholder-informed, phased BCT adoption framework—not yet tested through implementation—with direct policy and managerial implications for the Nigerian airport administration. Full article

Palm oil mill effluent (POME), the primary liquid residue from crude palm oil (CPO) extraction, has shifted from industrial wastewater to a valuable feedstock for renewable energy and resource recovery. This review synthesizes recent developments in sustainable POME management in Malaysia through a narrative review of peer-reviewed literature (Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar; 2013 onwards) and institutional reports, across four dimensions: anaerobic digestion technologies, environmental performance, techno-economic viability, and policy drivers. Characterized by a high organic load (COD 15,000–100,000 mg L⁻¹; BOD 10,250–43,750 mg L⁻¹), POME yields roughly 28–34 m³ of biogas per m³ of effluent with a 54–65% methane content, while its digestate offers nutrient recovery potential to replace synthetic fertilizers. Covered lagoons and continuous stirred-tank reactors (CSTRs) show the highest deployment potential, whereas upflow anaerobic sludge blanket (UASB) systems and anaerobic membrane bioreactors (AnMBRs) remain technically and economically constrained. Capital intensity, infrastructure gaps, and operational demands limit wider adoption. At the same time, digital process control and regulatory drivers such as the Malaysian Sustainable Palm Oil (MSPO) certification and the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) are critical enablers. Re-envisioning POME management as an integrated resource-recovery platform can lower greenhouse gas emissions, close nutrient loops, and accelerate Malaysia’s circular bioeconomy. Full article

The most attractive companies to work for play a crucial role in the sustainability environment. Previous studies have examined the relationship between excellent human resource management and social and environmental sustainability. The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between workplace excellence and economic sustainability. To this end, data from the annual ranking of the Revista de Actualidad Económica of the best places to work in Spain during the period 2013–2023 have been used, where Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is considered a key factor. This study uses observational secondary firm-level data covering the period 2013–2023 and applies comparative descriptive and inferential statistical analysis to examine differences between firms included and not included in the ranking. The findings indicate that the most attractive companies to work for are internationalized, large in size, and predominantly operate in the financial and insurance, professional and scientific, information, and energy supply sectors. These companies show better ratios in productivity, results and value added per employee, as well as equity. However, their profitability and solvency do not show significant results over time, so it cannot be clearly concluded that there is a relationship between the best companies to work for and economic sustainability. The practical implications of this study include recommendations for the government to promote complementary policies towards sustainability in general, such as both environmental (environmental certification) and inclusive social measures, among companies demonstrating higher CSR. Full article

This study conceptualizes RE100 not merely as a voluntary corporate campaign, but as an evolving socio-technical system that intersects with South Korea’s path-dependent energy regime. Applying BERTopic to a comprehensive corpus of 21,901 raw news articles (reduced to 13,507 analytically relevant articles after noise filtering; January 2019–October 2025), we trace the systemic evolution and multi-layered governance of RE100. Grounded in social constructionism and institutional systems theory, the research reveals how the global sustainability norm becomes structurally embedded in South Korea’s industrial and economic systems through a partially sequential evolutionary process of externalization, objectivation, and internalization. BERTopic identified 39 analytically meaningful topics, subsequently organized into four interpretive clusters: (1) local government-centered construction, (2) spatial reconfiguration and industrial-policy formation, (3) corporate-led market institutionalization, and (4) ESG-driven corporate governance. Collectively, these clusters demonstrate that RE100 has evolved from a peripheral international initiative into a multilayered governance norm embedded across local governance, industrial infrastructure, corporate strategy, and ESG systems. The findings hold theoretical and policy implications for energy-transition governance and climate communication. This progression is recursive rather than strictly linear: corporate-level internalization (Cluster 4) is conceptually linked to, and may interact with, regional and industrial-policy externalization (Clusters 1–2), consistent with a non-linear reading of institutionalization in which corporate site-selection criteria shape local-government infrastructure competition. Cluster 1’s prominence reflects local governments’ discursive visibility rather than substantive policy authority. Notably, RE100’s “normalization” denotes routinized corporate compliance practices, not political consensus on its legitimacy relative to alternatives such as carbon-free 100% or nuclear power. Full article

Renewable energy scenarios are widely used for power system stochastic optimization and risk evaluation, yet massive redundant scenarios boost computational complexity, waste resources and destabilize results, necessitating scenario reduction. This paper proposes an improved two-stage clustering method to overcome the manual parameter tuning defects of conventional clustering-based reduction. Specifically, the Snow Ablation Optimizer is embedded into DBSCAN to auto-adjust core hyperparameters, realizing efficient initial scenario reduction and suppressing the interference of abnormal data. Afterwards, K-means optimized via the Calinski–Harabasz index is adopted for secondary reduction to adaptively identify optimal cluster numbers and enhance the representativeness of reserved scenarios. Basic comparative simulations validate its technical superiority: handling 5000 raw scenarios only takes around 2 min, with the Wasserstein distance decreased by 7.73% and 17.79% versus backward reduction and forward selection, while the silhouette coefficient rises by 12.73% and Davies–Bouldin index drops by 7.95% compared with classic K-means. Further stochastic unit commitment tests quantify tangible economic and low-carbon gains in day-ahead scheduling, and empirical coefficient-based scaling analysis extends these benefits to long-term grid operation and policy deployment for TSOs/DSOs. The integrated results confirm the method’s technical, economic and sustainable merits, delivering actionable quantitative support for high-renewable power system low-carbon planning and energy policy formulation. Full article

This study addresses the growing complexity and heterogeneity of global decarbonization processes, which limit the effectiveness of traditional linear forecasting and policy approaches, and aims to develop an integrated model for coordinated forecasting and management at the macroeconomic level. The proposed D-CPFR (Decarbonization—Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment) framework combines country clustering based on self-organizing maps, nonlinear forecasting using multilayer perceptrons, and scenario-based multi-criteria optimization. The results demonstrate that clustering serves not only as an analytical tool but also as a structural basis for forming network interactions among countries with similar decarbonization characteristics, enabling coordinated decision-making and policy alignment. The model provides a mechanism for integrating forecasting outputs with joint management processes, including information exchange, scenario coordination, and investment planning within and across clusters. The findings confirm that the hybrid approach improves the representation of nonlinear relationships and supports more accurate and differentiated modeling of decarbonization trajectories. The proposed framework can be applied to the development of adaptive climate strategies, enhancement of resource allocation efficiency, and support of sustainable economic development across countries with varying levels of economic and energy development. Full article

Sustainable urban freight logistics requires routing decisions that jointly account for operating cost, vehicle technology, low-emission-zone (LEZ) access, terrain-sensitive energy use, and battery feasibility. This study develops a policy–terrain-coupled mixed-fleet routing framework integrating LEZ exposure, system-level carbon settlement, terrain-sensitive energy consumption, electric-vehicle (EV) battery feasibility, and route-level EV/internal-combustion-engine vehicle reassignment within a unified daily total operational cost (DTOC) evaluator. An adaptive large-neighborhood search (ALNS) procedure reconstructs feasible routes, while vehicle type is re-evaluated through counterfactual comparison of the complete system objective. The main experiments use 60 enhanced Gehring–Homberger benchmark-derived scenarios and 20 independent seeds, supplemented by ablation, carbon-price, EV-fixed-cost, heuristic-weight, convergence, and customer-scale scalability analyses. The ALNS-based framework achieves the lowest mean DTOC among the tested procedures, albeit with higher runtime. Policy and terrain information alter modeled fleet composition, with topology-dependent cost effects. Lower EV fixed costs consistently increase EV share, whereas carbon-price effects vary across network structures. All runs in the additional 200–1000-customer tests were feasible, although runtime increased with problem size. London- and Madrid-informed cases are treated as archetypes rather than as real-world validation cases. These results provide a basis for scenario screening and comparative planning of policy–terrain interactions before city-specific calibration and deployment. Full article

The maritime sector is undergoing rapid change due to stricter environmental regulations, shifting policies, and growing concerns about energy security and operational resilience. In this landscape, hybrid and all-electric ships (AES) are gaining recognition as effective solutions for reducing emissions, boosting efficiency, and harnessing alternative energy sources. Nonetheless, many electrification initiatives mainly target propulsion, while the entire onboard energy infrastructure, including generation, storage, distribution, power conversion, and energy management, is often developed separately. This paper investigates hybrid and AES systems linking maritime decarbonisation goals to the development of integrated onboard energy architectures. It starts with an overview of key international, European, and Portuguese policies that impact maritime decarbonisation, emphasising their influence on both the commercial and military sectors. The literature review then charts the evolution of onboard power systems, showing the shift from mechanical propulsion to integrated power solutions. Finally, it analyses different architectural configurations, energy storage technologies, alternative energy sources, and energy management strategies found in current research. Our analysis shows that adopting hybrid and AES systems requires a comprehensive system-level strategy that links power generation, storage, distribution, operational profiles, and energy management. By combining policy initiatives, technological progress, and current research, our review highlights the crucial role of integrated energy system architectures in the development of future hybrid and AES systems. We also identify key research gaps, such as multi-domain modelling, consistent performance metrics, mission-oriented energy management, and assessments of long-term robustness and operational sustainability. Full article

An in-depth understanding of the factors that enhance carbon footprints is a plausible pathway to enthrone environmental sustainability. Currently, the implications of energy and mineral depletion for carbon footprints in South Africa and Nigeria have received minimal empirical attention. The few available studies are non-exhaustive, often limiting broad-based policy refinements. With datasets spanning more than five decades (1971–2022), the novel Fourier Bootstrap Autoregressive Distributed Lag estimator was selected to account for structural breaks and nonlinearities. The empirical findings reveal divergent environmental pathways: South Africa’s carbon footprint (0.666% increase) is more related to energy depletion, reflecting coal-dominated electricity generation. Mineral depletion emerges as the primary culprit in Nigeria (10.856% increase), attributable to unregulated mining activities, including gas flaring and deforestation. Both countries face common challenges from urbanization (0.094% and 0.087% increases) and economic growth (0.107% and 0.046% increases). Trade openness shows insignificant effects. Short-run carbon footprint reductions from resource depletion improvements do not persist, underscoring the need for policy consistency. Policy effectiveness analysis identifies coal phase-out (0.9) and carbon pricing (0.8) as South Africa’s highest-return interventions. Mining regulation (0.9), green mining (0.9), and artisanal formalization (0.9) emerge as Nigeria’s priorities. The integration frameworks outperform siloed approaches. This implies South Africa may capture higher returns from policy coherence, while Nigeria may depend more on enforcement capacity. These findings provide evidence-based guidance for context-specific environmental policy design in resource-dependent economies. Full article

This study examines the dynamic connectedness and spillover transmission mechanisms among tourism-related exchange-traded funds (ETFs), clean energy markets, oil, geopolitical risks, and tourism transportation using daily percentage returns from 24 March 2017 to 16 March 2026. We employed a battery of econometric methodologies, including the R²-decomposed connectedness approach, a TVP-VAR framework to examine the extent and nature of connectedness and distinguish contemporaneous and lagged spillovers, and the DCC-GARCH specification to assess dynamic conditional correlations. The data exhibit substantial volatility and non-normality, supporting these dynamic econometric approaches. The results reveal that connectedness varies considerably over time and tends to intensify during periods of major economic and geopolitical uncertainty. PEJ emerges as the dominant overall net transmitter of shocks, primarily through lagged spillovers, while Transportation and Clean Energy act as contemporaneous transmitters but become net receivers in the lagged horizon. The decomposition further shows that contemporaneous linkages are relatively weak, while lagged effects are stronger, suggesting that shock transmission occurs gradually rather than instantaneously. The dynamic correlations are time-varying, and ETFs display asymmetric behavior across different market conditions. Overall, this study highlights the time-varying nature of interactions between tourism and clean energy assets, driven by energy market dynamics and geopolitical risks, and provides useful implications for portfolio diversification, risk management, and policy decisions in interconnected tourism and sustainable financial markets. Full article

South Korea faces an imminent spent nuclear fuel (SNF) storage bottleneck that threatens reactor operations and the country’s low-carbon transition. Using data from a nationwide, stratified face-to-face survey conducted in late 2024, this study examines public acceptance of an interim SNF storage facility (ISF) in South Korea. The survey included 1000 adults aged 20–65. Public acceptance was measured using a 1–9 support scale. We investigate its associations with respondents’ socioeconomic, regional, and attitudinal characteristics using ordered probit and ordinary least squares specifications. Opposition (47.4%) exceeds support (35.4%). In the preferred baseline ordered probit model, acceptance is positively associated with residence in the Seoul Metropolitan Area, self-reported familiarity with SNF management, stated tariff-cost-sharing orientation, age, education, income, and household headship, and negatively associated with province-level residence in an area containing one or more NPPs and with life satisfaction. Partial ordinal models indicate that the statistical significance of Education, Income, and Satisfaction is not robust across specifications. This study is grounded in the broader literature on procedural fairness, information asymmetry, and distributive equity. Within this framework, the observed associations inform a set of policy considerations. These considerations span transparent risk communication, tariff-linked cost sharing, independent monitoring, and community-benefit arrangements. This nationally representative evidence informs sustainable SNF governance and practical regulatory design for maintaining electricity reliability during the energy transition. Full article

Many current studies have purely regarded green finance as green credit, ignoring the background of carbon neutrality and energy transition. This paper investigates the relationships among green finance, green technological innovation, and urban ecological welfare performance. Using 279 Chinese cities as examples, this paper reveals the following: there is (1) a direct positive effect, where a 0.1-unit absolute increase in the green finance index (GFI) is associated with an average 0.0605-unit rise in ecological welfare performance (EWP); (2) a partial mediation mechanism through green technological innovation, establishing a “finance → technology → ecology” pathway; (3) temporal persistence of positive effects across pre-2012 and post-2012 policy periods; and (4) regional disparities with significant impacts in Eastern/Western/Northeastern China but insignificant effects in Central China due to lower green credit allocation and weaker R&D intensity. Robustness checks, including Winsorization and subgroup analyses, validate these results. This study advances the integration of environmental finance with sustainable development theory, offering actionable insights for achieving ecological welfare goals. Full article

Public buildings play a critical role in national decarbonization strategies and green energy transitions due to their high energy consumption densities, large occupant capacities, and potential to drive public awareness. Optimizing energy efficiency in these structures not only alleviates the financial burden on public budgets but also serves as a benchmark for sustainable urban development. To investigate the energy-saving potentials, thermal comfort dynamics, and financial feasibilities within this sector, this study selects two university buildings from two different countries with distinct climatic, structural, and operational profiles as comparative case studies: university buildings in Türkiye (TR) and Italy (IT), respectively. A total of seven tailored retrofitting scenarios were developed based on country-specific legislative frameworks and subsidy mechanisms: the Minimum Environmental Criteria (CAM) and Conto Termico 3.0 for Italy, and the Public Buildings Energy Efficiency Project (KABEV), Energy Performance Contracting (EPC), and Nearly Zero Energy Buildings (NSEB) mandates for Türkiye. The scenarios evaluate deep building envelope insulation, high-efficiency window replacements, lighting automation (LED with daylighting controls), mechanical ventilation with heat recovery units (HRV), air-to-water heat pump integrations, and rooftop photovoltaic (PV) installations using calibrated DesignBuilder simulation models. The quantitative results demonstrate that country-specific green building incentives drastically enhance both the energy performance and financial viability of deep retrofits. For the Turkish case study, the comprehensive near-zero energy building (nZEB) retrofitting package (TR-4) successfully reduced annual primary energy consumption by 75% (from 284 to 71 kWh/m²·year) and cut annual thermal comfort discomfort hours by 72% (from 3147 to 880 h), yielding a Subsidized Net Present Value (NPV) of +310,600 €. Similarly, for the Italian case study, the holistic retrofit combined with rooftop photovoltaic integration (IT-4) achieved an 80% energy reduction (dropping from 128 to 25.6 kWh/m²·year), minimized annual discomfort hours to 45 h, and generated a Subsidized NPV of +425,500 €. Furthermore, national incentive mechanisms shortened simple payback periods by more than half, establishing that targeted public policy is vital to accelerate public sector building decarbonization while ensuring long-term fiscal profitability. Full article

Sustained enhancement of energy utilization efficiency constitutes a pivotal lever for achieving dual carbon goals. To examine both the local effects and spatial spillovers of the Energy-use Rights Trading System (ERTS) on urban green total factor energy efficiency (GTFEE), this study employs the super-efficiency EBM-GML index to measure GTFEE across 270 prefecture-level cities in China from 2013 to 2022. Utilizing a Spatial-DID model, we find that the ERTS significantly drives local GTFEE improvements, with the positive effect intensifying over time, while concurrently exerting a negative spatial spillover on GTFEE in neighboring cities. Mechanism analysis suggests that the ERTS enhances local GTFEE through increased R&D investment, optimized fossil energy structures, and improved energy resource allocation in pilot cities, yet suppresses GTFEE improvement in adjacent areas via reduced R&D investment, a worsening fossil energy structure, and resource misallocation. These patterns are consistent with cross-regional flows of R&D resources and energy-intensive industries between pilot and non-pilot cities. Heterogeneity tests reveal that the policy’s effects on pilot city GTFEE are more pronounced in cities with larger populations, stronger industrial bases, more abundant human capital, greater resource endowments, and more transparent environmental information disclosure. Moreover, the population size of pilot cities intensifies the negative spatial spillover effect on neighboring GTFEE, whereas a well-established industrial base in pilot cities mitigates such adverse spillovers. It should be noted, however, that the Spatial-DID model is sensitive to the specification of spatial weights, and the mechanism analysis can only provide indirect evidence of cross-regional factor and industrial mobility. These findings offer spatial-effect empirical evidence to inform the further refinement of the ERTS under the dual carbon framework. Full article