Charlie Wilson

The challenge to keep global warming below 2 °C

The latest carbon dioxide emissions continue to track the high end of emission scenarios, making it even less likely global warming will stay below 2 °C. A shift to a 2 °C pathway requires immediate significant and sustained global mitigation, with a probable reliance on net negative emissions in the longer term.

Smart homes and their users: a systematic analysis and key challenges

Published research on smart homes and their users is growing exponentially, yet a clear understanding of who these users are and how they might use smart home technologies is missing from a field being overwhelmingly pushed by technology developers. Through a systematic analysis of peer-reviewed literature on smart homes and their users, this paper takes stock of the dominant research themes and the linkages and disconnects between them. Key findings within each of nine themes are analysed, grouped into three: (1) views of the smart home—functional, instrumental, socio-technical; (2) users and the use of the smart home—prospective users, interactions and decisions, using technologies in the home; and (3) challenges for realising the smart home—hardware and software, design, domestication. These themes are integrated into an organising framework for future research that identifies the presence or absence of cross-cutting relationships between different understandings of smart homes and their users. The usefulness of the organising framework is illustrated in relation to two major concerns—privacy and control—that have been narrowly interpreted to date, precluding deeper insights and potential solutions. Future research on smart homes and their users can benefit by exploring and developing cross-cutting relationships between the research themes identified.

Energy Pathways for Sustainable Development

Chapter 17 explores possible transformational pathways of the future global energy system with the overarching aim of assessing the technological feasibility as well as the economic implications of meeting a range of sustainability objectives simultaneously. As such, it aims at the integration across objectives, and thus goes beyond earlier assessments of the future energy system that have mostly focused on either specific topics or single objectives.

Future capacity growth of energy technologies: are scenarios consistent with historical evidence?

Future scenarios of the energy system under greenhouse gas emission constraints depict dramatic growth in a range of energy technologies. Technological growth dynamics observed historically provide a useful comparator for these future trajectories. We find that historical time series data reveal a consistent relationship between how much a technology’s cumulative installed capacity grows, and how long this growth takes. This relationship between extent (how much) and duration (for how long) is consistent across both energy supply and end-use technologies, and both established and emerging technologies. We then develop and test an approach for using this historical relationship to assess technological trajectories in future scenarios. Our approach for “learning from the past” contributes to the assessment and verification of integrated assessment and energy-economic models used to generate quantitative scenarios. Using data on power generation technologies from two such models, we also find a consistent extent - duration relationship across both technologies and scenarios. This relationship describes future low carbon technological growth in the power sector which appears to be conservative relative to what has been evidenced historically. Specifically, future extents of capacity growth are comparatively low given the lengthy time duration of that growth. We treat this finding with caution due to the low number of data points. Yet it remains counter-intuitive given the extremely rapid growth rates of certain low carbon technologies under stringent emission constraints. We explore possible reasons for the apparent scenario conservatism, and find parametric or structural conservatism in the underlying models to be one possible explanation.

Multiple models to inform climate change policy: a pragmatic response to the 'beyond the ABC' debate

We have followed with interest the debate in this journal between Shove (2010; 2011) and Whitmarsh & colleagues (2011) on contrasting theoretical approaches and representations of pro-environmental behaviour and social change, and of the potential, rationale and merit of interdisciplinarity or integration. In this commentary, we offer a pragmatic response to the issues being debated from the perspective of policymakers concerned with near-term reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. This response is informed by the recent experience of one of us (Chatterton) during a year-long Research Council UK (RCUK) Energy Programme Fellowship as a social scientist based in the Department of Energy & Climate Change (DECC). The title of this Fellowship, “Individuals’ and Communities’ Energy Behaviour”, reflects the dominant conceptualisation of behaviour among policymakers as elaborated by Shove (2010), as well as the prevailing interest within government in the potential for behaviour change to contribute towards policy goals. ‘Behaviour change’ policies are being promoted as an attractive alternative to the more established approaches of legislation, regulation, and taxation (p4, Dolan et al. 2010). The current UK government’s coalition agreement argues for “shunning the bureaucratic levers of the past and finding intelligent ways to encourage, support and enable people to make better choices for themselves” (pp7-8, HMG 2010b). Supporting institutional developments include the creation of the Cabinet Office’s Behavioural Insights Team in 2010, and the recent House of Lords Science & Technology Select Committee’s inquiry into “the use of behaviour change interventions to achieve policy goals” (p88, House_of_Lords 2011). Here, we are primarily concerned with climate change mitigation as the policy goal, itself often framed within broader sustainability objectives.

Policies for the Energy Technology Innovation System (ETIS)

The development and introduction of heat pumps provides an interesting illustration of policy influence and effectiveness in relation to energy technology innovation. Heat pumps have been supported by several countries since the 1970s as a strategy to improve energy efficiency, support energy security, reduce environmental degradation, and combat climate change. Sweden and Switzerland have been essential to the development and commercialization of heat pumps in Europe. In both countries, numerous policy incentives have lined the path of technology and market development. Early policy initiatives were poorly coordinated but supported technology development, entrepreneurial experimentation, knowledge development, and the involvement of important actors in networks and organisations. The market collapse in the mid 1980s could have resulted in a total failure ‐ but did not. The research programmes continued in the 1980s, and a new set of stakeholders formed ‐ both publicly and privately funded researchers, authorities, and institutions ‐ and provided an important platform for further development. In the 1990s and 2000s, Sweden and Switzerland introduced more coordinated and strategic policy incentives for the development of heat pumps. The approaches were flexible and adjusted over time. The policy interventions in both countries supported learning, successful development and diffusion processes, and cost reductions. This assessment of innovation and diffusion policies for heat pump systems can be used to generalise some insights for energy technology innovation policy.

Structured decision-making to link climate change and sustainable development

Structured decision-making concepts and tools have been broadly applied in a wide range of policy contexts to help advance clear, creative and pluralistic decision processes. Policies to link climate change adaptation and mitigation with sustainable development must address a number of complexities which include linkages across scales and irreducible uncertainties. Decision support tools such as objectives networks and influence diagrams are useful for structuring these complex decision problems. These tools and their underlying rationale are described, and then applied to a concrete example to illustrate their relevance for linking adaptation, mitigation and sustainable development decisions. The example used is a major transportation infrastructure programme in British Columbia, Canada, with clear impacts on both climate change and regional sustainability.

The ‘Four Dimensions of Behaviour’ framework: a tool for characterising behaviours to help design better interventions

This paper sets out the rationale and structure of a tool for assisting policy-makers and practitioners to understand behavioural challenges and open up thinking on the design of effective ‘behaviour change’ interventions. The ‘Four Dimensions of Behaviour’ (4DB) framework is based on the theoretical and empirical research in a range of policy domains including transport and pro-environmental behaviour more generally. The 4DB framework characterises multifaceted behaviours along dimensions of actor, domain, durability and scope. Its application in workshop or structured settings opens up diverse and non-exclusive discussion on designing interventions to match salient behavioural characteristics. The use of the 4DB framework in the transport domain is demonstrated for travel behaviours of interest to policy-makers using examples of buying plug-in vehicles (PiVs), commuting by bicycle, eco-driving and making business trips by train.

Smart Homes and Their Users

Smart home technologies promise to transform domestic comfort, convenience, security and leisure while also reducing energy use. But delivering on these potentially conflicting promises depends on how are adopted and used in homes. This book is one of the first attempts to explore systematically how and why people use smart home technologies, and what impact this has on different aspects of domestic life. The book starts by developing a new analytical framework for understanding smart homes and their users. Drawing on a range of new empirical research combining both qualitative and quantitative data, the book then explores how smart home technologies are perceived by potential users, how they can be used to link domestic energy use to common daily activities, how they may (or may not) be integrated into everyday life by actual users, and how they serve to change the nature of control within households and the home. The book concludes by synthesising a range of evidence-based insights, and posing a series of challenges for industry, policy, and research that need addressing if a smart home future is to be realised. This book should appeal to an audience of researchers, policy makers, and practitioners including smart home technology developers, designers, manufacturers, and retailers. For researchers, the book is targeted at those with interest in the areas of energy social science, human-computer interaction and user-centred design. The book demonstrates the value of cross-cutting, integrative research questions and approaches across these disciplines. For policymakers and practitioners, the book is targeted at those with interest in the development and diffusion of smart home technologies, including those focused on the potential contribution of smart homes to a smarter, more efficient energy system.

Stranded research? Leading finance journals are silent on climate change

Finance research has shaped the modern financial system, influencing investors and market participants directly through research findings and indirectly through teaching and training programmes. Climate change presents major risks to the global financial system as well as new opportunities for investors. Is climate finance an important topic in finance research? We systematically analyse the content of 20,725 articles published in the leading 21 finance journals between January 1998 and June 2015. We find that only 12 articles (0.06%) are related in some way to climate finance. The three elite finance journals (Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics and Review of Financial Studies) did not publish a single article related to climate finance over the 17.5-year period. We repeat our analysis across a sample of 29 elite business journals spanning accounting, economics, management, marketing and operations research, as well as finance. We find a similar dearth of published climate finance research. We consider four possible explanations for this failure of top finance and business journals to engage with climate finance as a research topic. These include methodological constraints and editorial policies. We conclude by arguing why it is critical for climate-related research to be given greater attention and prominence in finance journals.