Editorial: Environmental policy and renewable energy

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:UK climate policy history and carbon accounting methods provide a comprehensive overview for researchers.

🏢実務担当者:Solar thermal innovations in India may interest companies in water and food processing sectors.

🏛政策担当者:Lessons on carbon leakage and policy persuasion are valuable for policymakers designing climate strategies.

Welcome to this edition of Energy (Proceedings of the ICE). This issue opens with two articles on environmental policy, followed by two articles that describe the development and testing in India of devices that use solar energy to replace fossil fuels for process energy, one for desalination and the other for desiccation.The first article is a summary of UK climate policy, strategy and standards; Hammond (2026) describes the history of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction in the UK since the introduction of the Climate Change Act in 2008 with the goal of a 68% reduction by 2030. Although the UK contribution to global emissions is relatively small, the scale of UK ambition in this context is bold and became more so after the 2025 Paris Agreement, when the government committed to a target of net-zero emissions by 2050. The paper tracks progress towards this target through a series of carbon budgets, and quotes the UK’s Climate Change Committee claim that net zero is ‘achievable with known technologies, alongside improvements in people’s lives, and within the expected economic cost’. Despite the UK’s steady progress the net-zero policy remains controversial, perhaps more so now than when it was introduced, and it is blamed by some for the high cost of UK energy and other ills. The article examines the relationship between UK domestic emissions and the production of goods and services including energy itself. Such activity is essential for economic growth, and the article examines critically some of the many ways in which successive UK governments have sought to drive ‘clean growth’. Critics of the UK approach to emissions mitigation point to the problem of ‘carbon leakage’ in which domestic emissions have been reduced by simply replacing the production of carbon dioxide intensive products (such as steel and chemicals) with imports of those products. The article describes ways in which GHG emissions are counted, whether they occur domestically as part of the production process or as imports in the form of ‘consumption emissions’. Both types of emissions are considered in environmental life cycle assessment and associated GHG accounting methods. The article describes these in detail, as well as the associated international standards that attempt to ensure that calculations are meaningful and can therefore drive effective mitigation. The article concludes by observing that despite its relatively small contribution to global emissions, since the UK industrialised in the eighteenth century it has been responsible for a very significant part of the accumulated GHGs that lead to global heating. The UK wishes to show global leadership in this policy area; however, as the article states, successive UK governments have not always persuaded their own citizens of the importance and ethical basis of UK climate policy, or the dangers of inadequate planning for adaptation.The second article, by Osei-Gyebi and Egwaikhide (2026), also discusses climate policy but focuses specifically on a comparison between the impacts of environmental taxes and renewable energy on the ecological footprints of three African countries. The article is important because the African perspective is rarely considered in discussions of environmental policy, perhaps because developing countries have so far been responsible for relatively few global emissions. As readers will expect, the article finds a strong negative correlation between increased penetration of renewable energy and ecological footprints in all three countries, with South Africa having the highest footprint and the lowest penetration of renewable energy. However, the article includes a rather surprising finding that there is a small negative correlation between environmental taxation and deployment of renewables. This is explained by the authors in terms of institutional weakness and government failures such as lack of enforcement and a tendency to scrap unpopular regulations under pressure from the public and businesses. There are also accusations of misallocation or even embezzlement of funds raised through environmental taxation. More research is needed on the causal link between environmental taxes and investment in renewable energy, but the article contains important lessons for policymakers that echo those in the article by Hammond (2026). In a democracy, politicians must find better ways to persuade their citizens to play their part in emissions reduction.The last two articles both describe the use of solar thermal technologies to drive industrial processes in rural India. Ramalingam et al. (2026) describe the results of an experimental study of the extent to which the performance of a solar still can be enhanced by combination with a parabolic reflector to increase the output of a desalination process. This relatively simple modification was found to increase overall yield by a factor of 2.1 although the cost of the modified still was three times that of the original, raising the economic payback period from 313 to 395 days.In the last article, Vinay et al. (2026) describe the results of an experimental comparison of three different grades of sand used for thermal storage in a food desiccation process. Evacuated tube collectors are used to heat the sand which releases heat into the air flowing into the food drying chamber. Whether one, two or three tubes were used, the best performance was always found with fine-grained sand, and the worst with coarse-grained sand. Furthermore, more rapid desiccation was shown to enhance the quality of dried carrot in terms of colour retention, shrinkage and uniformity. These results are valuable since rapid desiccation is essential to avoid microbial spoilage, and the use of thermal storage allows more stable drying over a longer period than otherwise would be the case.These articles are clear examples of the ways in which renewable energy technologies can be embraced by citizens to drive the clean growth that is needed globally. I hope you enjoy the variety of the papers in this issue. Please remember you can access more recent papers in the Earlycite section of Emerald Insight at emerald.com/journals.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.1680/jener.2026.179.3.141first seen 2026-08-09 05:03:29