Search Results (242)

Today, the transformation of energy systems is at the core of climate change mitigation. This transformation brings substantial implications for citizens. Coal-to-renewable energy transitions require new workforce skills while affecting regional economies and communities. Thus, a broader interdisciplinary approach integrating energy justice and participatory methods into energy transition research is required to clarify these sociotechnical transformations. To address this gap, this article conducts a systematic review of the just energy transition literature, focusing on studies where participation plays a methodological or conceptual role. Based on a systematic review of 42 articles, our findings show that participation enables stakeholders and policymakers to widen the energy policy discussion to account for plural values and procedural justice concerns of stakeholders involved in a complex socioecological system. This inquiry is timely, as energy practitioners, policymakers, and scholars increasingly seek to operationalize justice within energy transition frameworks. However, the review reveals a discrepancy between the widespread acknowledgment that just transition processes must be participatory and inclusive, and their limited realization in practice. These findings underscore the need for greater methodological experimentation with deliberative forms of participation, broader inclusion of stakeholder groups, and the development of context-sensitive guidelines to operationalize justice in energy transitions. Full article

As just transition debates extend into agricultural land use, this study examines landscape transition in Huwei Township, Taiwan, through a procedural justice lens. To address severe land subsidence, the state has promoted a shift from paddy rice cultivation to dryland farming, but the transition remains politically contested. Based on a systematic review of 55 empirical studies (2020–2026) and 12 semi-structured interviews, the study identifies a key mismatch in problem attribution: official accounts emphasize irrigation, whereas farmers point to urban development pressures and infrastructure burdens. The findings also show that cultivation-decoupled subsidies enable landowners to capture compensation while shifting operational risks onto tenant farmers and other vulnerable groups. The study argues that a socially sustainable transition depends on incorporating local knowledge and redesigning subsidy eligibility and risk-sharing rules to strengthen procedural justice, representativeness, and accountability. Full article

In Latin America, sustainable commitments towards decarbonizing hard-to-abate industrial sectors have identified hydrogen (H2) as a key enabler for the energy transition. This study develops a policy analytical framework to enhance the green H2 economy, using Argentina as the central case study. Key insights from this study include identifying often-overlooked social challenges within the H2 economy and proposing the integration of social indicators into policy design, with a particular focus on the territorial dynamics of Patagonia, labor conditions, Indigenous participation, governance, and community impacts. Drawing from Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA) guideline standards and H2 justice approach, this study highlights key social hotspots that existing S-LCA tools overlook due to their lack of specific focus on regional territories and their communities. The analysis combines six social impact categories, namely, human rights, working conditions, health and safety, cultural heritage, governance, and socio-economic repercussions as recommended by the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), analyzed at three levels, and complemented by the H2 justice approach for Argentina’s potential green H2 production sector. These policy recommendations aim to foster a more resilient and sustainable development of the green H2 industry. Full article

Understanding why national decarbonization pathways diverge is essential for designing effective climate and energy policy. Using harmonized data for 1970–2022 from Our World in Data and the Maddison Project Database, this study examines long-run emission trends and electricity-mix transitions in four countries representing distinct energy regimes: Japan, Australia, India, and South Africa. We combine per-capita and total CO₂ trajectories with a Kaya–LMDI decomposition aligned with updated methodological guidelines. Results reveal persistent and deepening transition divergence. Japan experienced partial decoupling before a nuclear vulnerability shock in 2011 reversed progress and temporarily increased fossil dependence. Australia shows a recent erosion of long-standing coal lock-in, driven by policy reform and falling renewable costs. India and South Africa remain highly coal-dependent, with population and income growth overwhelming improvements in energy intensity. Across countries, efficiency gains contributed to emission mitigation, but only structural changes in fuel mix produced sustained reductions in carbon intensity. Taken together, these findings suggest that divergent institutional and infrastructural lock-in conditions—rather than income levels alone—shape the pace, direction, and resilience of decarbonization. The study also speaks to recent international policy debates emphasized by the IPCC and the IEA, as well as to justice-oriented discussions in the energy transition literature. The results highlight major implications for climate policy, energy-system resilience, and just transition strategies. Full article

Carrier-phase ambiguity validation is essential to ensure the reliability of integer ambiguity resolution in high-precision GNSS positioning. Although integer equivariant (IE) estimators provide optimal integer candidates within their class, noise and model limitations may lead to incorrect fixing. Validation procedures are therefore crucial for safeguarding the transition from float to fixed solutions, particularly in high-precision and safety-critical applications. In this contribution we introduce the concept of Fourier ambiguity validation and show how it is rooted in the principles of integer aperture (IA) estimation and its periodic representation. Unlike classical integer estimators that always return an integer solution, IA estimators introduce adjustable acceptance regions in the float ambiguity domain and fix ambiguities only when sufficient statistical evidence is present. As a result we present a general Fourier representation of IA estimators and provide an analytical description of the probabilistic properties of integer-aperture bootstrapping. We also present a hybrid description and show how the spatial and frequency representations can be mixed so as to do justice to the practical situation when carrier-phase ambiguities have a wide range of varying precision. Full article

Background/Objectives: Municipal hospitals in transitional health systems operate under structural resource constraints that complicate managerial decision-making and shape patient perceptions. This study examines how patients interpret resource allocation and evaluate the ethical and legitimacy consequences of alternative strategic priorities. Methods: A qualitative research design was employed using semi-structured patient interviews. Participants were recruited using purposive sampling based on predefined inclusion criteria: age over 18, hospitalization for digestive symptoms, undergoing diagnostic investigations, and provision of informed consent. Thematic analysis identified key expectation domains related to technological modernization, workforce capacity, infrastructure, and relational communication. These themes were translated into core governance variables and integrated into a conceptual simulation model comparing three allocation scenarios: technological investment, human resource expansion, and status quo preservation. Results: Findings show that patient evaluations extend beyond satisfaction to include distributive fairness, symbolic modernization, and institutional legitimacy. Simulation findings suggest that technological investment strengthens symbolic legitimacy and perceived equity but may increase workload and fiscal exposure; workforce expansion enhances relational justice and operational stability yet leaves modernization gaps; and status quo preservation maintains short-term fiscal balance while risking gradual legitimacy erosion. Conclusions: The study demonstrates that satisfaction metrics alone are insufficient for governance evaluation. Integrating ethical analysis, organizational legitimacy theory, participatory input, and systems thinking provides a structured framework for assessing resource allocation trade-offs in resource-constrained municipal hospitals. Full article

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has transitioned from a specialized research area to a ubiquitous socio-technical infrastructure influencing sectors from healthcare and law to manufacturing and defense. In tandem with its transformative promise, AI has created an exponentially expanding ethics literature questioning, fairness, transparency, accountability, and justice. This review synthesizes publications and key policy developments between 2019 and 2025, bringing sectoral discourses together with cross-cutting frameworks. Grounded in a systematic scoping review methodology, we frame the field along four meta-dimensions: trust and transparency, bias and fairness, governance & regulation, and justice, while we investigate their expression across diverse sectors. Special attention is dedicated to healthcare (patient trust and algorithmic bias), education (integrity and authorship), media (misinformation), law (accountability), and the industrial sector (data integrity, intellectual property protection, and environmental safety). We ground abstract principles in concrete case studies to illustrate real-world harms and mitigation strategies. Furthermore, we incorporate pluralistic ethics (e.g., Ubuntu, Islamic perspectives), environmental ethics, and emerging challenges posed by Generative AI and neuro-AI interfaces. To bridge theory and practice, we propose an operational governance framework for organizations. We contend that success involves transitioning from principles toward ethics-by-design, pluralistic governance, sustainability, and adaptive oversight. This review is intended for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers who need a comprehensive and actionable framework for navigating the complex landscape of AI ethics. Full article

HM Inspectorate of Probation is committed to building and utilising the evidence base for high-quality youth justice services, and to promoting excellence and having a positive impact upon those inspected and the wider sector. Research evidence and inspection findings are used to inform understanding of what helps and what hinders services and to consider system-wide change. In this article, the latest inspection and research findings in relation to the high-profile areas of serious youth violence and criminal exploitation are highlighted. The article encompasses insights from core and thematic inspections, including those from recent joint targeted area inspections (JTAIs) undertaken with other inspectorates. Alongside the JTAIs which examined multi-agency responses to serious youth violence, research was commissioned to hear directly from children and families about their experiences. Other research commissioned and published by the Inspectorate has emphasised the importance of implementing relational, child-centred and trauma-informed approaches and to optimising collaborative/partnership working across agencies and sectors. Reports have also drawn attention to the value of paying attention to the socio-ecological framework, systemic resilience, adultification biases, and both contextual and transitional safeguarding. Full article

At the current stage, water resource shortages and significant regional disparities in resource distribution severely restrict China’s food security. Existing research primarily focuses on resource use efficiency, while lacking a systematic framework to distinguish between equality and equity in the coupled distribution of irrigation water, grain production, and nitrogen pollution across major river basins. The core objective of this study is to utilize the Concentration Index (CI) to construct a unified equity assessment framework, quantify the evolution of equality and equity in irrigation water use, grain production, and nitrogen loss to surface water in different river basins in China from 1992 to 2017, and determine the key influencing factors. For positive production resources, a distribution that benefits low-income groups is equity, while for pollution burdens, this distribution pattern is inequity. The results show that water shortages in Northern China have intensified, and higher income groups have obtained excessive benefits. The distribution of grain production has shifted from favoring higher income groups to favoring low-income groups, with the Concentration Index changing from 0.214 to −0.052, indicating an enhancement in equity. Irrigation water use has shown a certain degree of improvement, with the CI dropping from 0.023 to 0.017. However, nitrogen loss to surface water has exacerbated environmental inequality, with the CI dropping from 0.10 to 0.03, indicating that pollution burdens have shifted to low-income groups. Changes in equity across the country are driven by a small number of high-intensity grain production areas, and the key influencing factors include food security policies, urbanization, population size, and nitrogen fertilizer application. An asymmetric coupling relationship exists between water resource shortages and equity, and the regional economic foundation determines the formation of synergy or trade-offs. The findings underscore the necessity of transitioning from efficiency-focused to equity-focused agricultural governance in China. Targeted policies should include cross-basin ecological compensation mechanisms, differentiated technology promotion strategies, and integrated water–food-pollution management systems to balance food security, environmental protection, and social justice. Full article

While scholars have written about programs that support community college (CC) students in STEMM and their transition to four-year institutions, less attention has been paid to culturally informed approaches addressing cultural mismatch and leveraging community cultural wealth (CCW). This paper presents results from qualitative research conducted through five focus groups with 43 CC students who attended a summer program over three summers. Grounded in strategies that address cultural mismatch by drawing on CCW and ancestral strengths to foster STEMM success, the summer program provides CC students with professional tools and skills for their educational trajectories and supports them as they pursue a STEMM pathway. The findings revealed that learning about multiple pathways through faculty members’ academic journeys, bonding with peers, and gaining the language to describe home–school mismatch experiences allowed students to reduce intimidation and self-blame, increase self-efficacy, develop a stronger science identity invested in social justice, and demonstrate greater willingness to engage with institutional actors. In sum, humanizing STEMM not only portrays a holistic picture of the field but also demystifies the notion of STEMM as a “cold” career, enabling students to more readily see themselves in role models and envision themselves on a viable career path. Full article

The transition towards sustainable energy systems requires a paradigm shift from purely economic optimization to a holistic framework that internalizes environmental and social externalities. This article integrates social and environmental aspects into the multi-objective dispatch model based on mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) for the economic, environmental, and social dispatch (EEDS) of a polygeneration microgrid. Unlike traditional approaches that treat social impact as a static planning constraint, this study introduces a quantified “Social Shadow Price” into the operational objective function, aiming to operationalize the concept of energy justice. The model is applied to a case study featuring a high-load factor industrial demand profile, integrated with thermal generation, solar PV, wind power, and BESS storage. Results demonstrate that internalizing environmental and social costs significantly alters the merit order dispatch, reducing the utilization of socially contentious technologies while leveraging storage arbitrage to mitigate intermittency. Furthermore, a sensitivity analysis is conducted to determine the optimal capacity of renewable energy sources, revealing that a balanced mix of solar and wind minimizes the composite sustainability index. The findings suggest that this EEDS framework provides a viable pathway for policymakers to achieve a socially equitable energy transition in industrial sectors. Full article

Conventional dispatch models, which are primarily focused on cost minimization, prove insufficient to address the multidimensional challenges of a Just Energy Transition. In order to address this discrepancy, the present paper puts forth the Economic, Environmental, and Social Dispatch (EEDS) model. The EEDS model is a Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) Unit Commitment formulation that explicitly incorporates socio-environmental externalities. The methodology implements a two-stage rolling horizon simulator (Day-Ahead and Real-Time) with high temporal resolution (5 min), validated on a polygeneration microgrid integrated with Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS). The numerical results indicate that the incorporation of quantified social costs substantially modifies the merit order, effectively displacing technologies that are deemed to be socially regressive. Moreover, the analysis demonstrates that demand morphology is a pivotal factor in determining system performance, achieving zero Unserved Energy (ENS) and competitive prices across diverse profiles. Finally, the application of scenario analysis demonstrates that BESS is essential for managing diverse demand morphologies and moderating price volatility across different operational contexts. Therefore, the EEDS framework provides a rigorous quantitative foundation upon which economic efficiency, sustainability, and operational social justice can be balanced. Full article

Background: Professional identity and ethical integrity are foundational to nursing practice and are shaped in part by educational experiences. This study evaluated an online Holocaust and genocide educational seminar delivered to fourth-year Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) students and explored how students linked seminar content to professional identity formation, ethical vigilance, and patient advocacy. Methods: We conducted a descriptive mixed-methods educational evaluation. Students completed an anonymous pre-seminar survey (demographics, motivations for studying nursing, self-identified desirable professional qualities, and self-rated knowledge of the Holocaust and other genocides) and an anonymous post-seminar feedback survey with four open-ended questions. Quantitative items were summarized descriptively; qualitative data were analyzed using inductive qualitative content analysis. Results: Of the 205 students who attended the seminar, 133 completed the pre-seminar survey, and 110 completed the post-seminar survey. Students reported high baseline knowledge of the Holocaust but limited knowledge of the Armenian and Rwandan genocides. The five themes that emerged are as follows: (1) ethical judgment and the influence of nurses; (2) patient advocacy and social justice; (3) the effect of historical and contemporary trauma on students’ learning experience; (4) genocide awareness and prevention; and (5) approaches to education and content presentation. Conclusions: Carefully facilitated Holocaust and genocide education, delivered through interactive online pedagogy and structured debriefing, may support late-stage nursing students’ reflection on ethical integrity and professional identity during the transition to professional practice. Full article

The renewable energy transition has become one of the vital pathways for approaching climate change and promoting sustainability. The success of this transition, however, does not depend only on technical and economic considerations, but is mainly influenced by social and institutional factors that form acceptance and support. This study aims at measuring the contribution of social capital, the awareness of the energy transition, and the institutional context in increasing the level of public support for the energy transition among Sultan Qaboos University students. It adopts a cross-sectional quantitative approach, and data are collected through a multi-section questionnaire from a sample of 437 male and female students from different colleges, majors, and academic years at Sultan Qaboos University. These tools of the study measure the dimensions of social capital: trust, social networks, bridging, institutional linking, and student participation. They also evaluate objective knowledge and self-perceived awareness of the renewable energy transition, in addition to components of the institutional context within the university: the sustainability climate on campus, opportunities for participation, and trust in governance/procedural justice. The indicators of internal consistency (reliability) also show significant values: the Cronbach’s Alpha coefficients range approximately between 0.715 and 0.893 for the independent variables and reach 0.864 for the dependent variable. The results of this study show that most of the students fall within the high level of support (77.3%), with no statistically significant differences based on gender, college type, academic year, or previous volunteering experience. The ordinal logistic regression results indicate that the campus sustainability climate is the strongest factor influencing higher levels of support followed by trust in governance/procedural justice and general trust (TR). The bridging dimension (BB) does not have a significant independent influence after accounting for the other variables. This study emphasizes that increasing support for the renewable energy transition in the university environment requires strengthening an institutional climate which supports sustainability, promoting fair and transparent governance, expanding participation opportunities, and investing in building trust and strengthening institutional connections to encourage pro-sustainability behaviors. Full article

The expansion of wind energy projects in Indigenous territories has intensified debates about the social legitimacy of corporate practices. In the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca, the main wind corridor in Mexico, wind farms coexist with deeply rooted Zapotec governance systems, creating a complex interface between corporate responsibility and community well-being. Based on a survey of 184 workers employed by wind companies in the region, this study examines the relationship between perceived Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), in its ethical, legal, and philanthropic dimensions, and social and economic well-being. Using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and Importance–Performance Map Analysis (IPMA), we found that legal and philanthropic CSR significantly enhance both types of well-being, whereas ethical CSR only affects social well-being. These findings reflect the perspective of workers as hybrid actors, simultaneously employees and members of Zapotec communities, and should be interpreted in light of the study’s limitations: its focus on employed individuals, cross-sectional design, and reliance on self-reported perceptions. The results contribute to global debates on symbolic versus substantive CSR, distributive justice, and the risk of “green colonialism” in energy transitions. Full article