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Executive SummaryThe need to decarbonise the economy in order to slow the pace of climate change is now recognised as one of the most pressing international policy challenges. While the UK cannot by itself materially affect global climate change, it has an opportunity to play an influential role, both by persuading others of the need for action but also by reshaping its domestic economy to benefit from a low-carbon transition.Far from hampering competitiveness, adoption of a coordinated policy approach to climate change today would generate positive benefits for the UK economy, especially if it addresses the multiple market failures that promote pollution and places decarbonisation at the heart of structural economic policy.Desirable strategies would include public support for research, development, and deployment of new technologies, and measures to foster an environment where innovation can rapidly shift the economy from dirty to clean production systems. Focusing UK industrial strategy on securing strong domestic supply chains for green products and services, for example, could help create an early mover advantage in rapidly growing global market sectors. Interventions could include the establishment of a National Infrastructure Bank to support decarbonisation in crucial sectors such as energy and transport, and would also need to encompass measures to assist structural adjustment in affected industries and their workforces.

The decarbonisation of the power sector signifies reducing its carbon dependency. The aim of several programmes is making a conversion to a sustainable & low-carbon economy. Some of the targets by the EU are legally binding, thus appear in the national legislation and strategies. To meet the objective, we need to use renewable energy soures expansively.

This study is a review of current EU energy policy and its implementation, in order to determine the lessons that can be learned in terms of developing an energy policy that meets the objective of sustainability (i.e. meeting the CO2 reduction targets set in the light of the EU's Paris commitments) but at the same time delivers on competitiveness (generating competitive prices and creating jobs, fairness (ensuring fair prices for citizens and sharing fairly any burden between citizens across the EU) as well as energy security. In addition, the role of energy technologies has been analysed across different energy scenarios aiming at complying with Paris agreement targets and supported by detailed modelling. Having verified the discrepancies of these energy scenarios in terms of technological decarbonisation potential and needed investments, we provide evidence of the future costs of certain strategic energy technologies towards a cost-effective EU decarbonisation. In particular, we focus on the future costs of renewable electricity and hydrogen technologies. We first analysed the potential future uses of electricity and hydrogen across scenarios and then the assumptions on future costs of these technologies (e.g. levelized costs, technical potential), drawing conclusions on their cost-competitiveness and on the need for further policy support.

The implementation process for the COP21 Agreement must now start in order to have any chance of succeeding with its main objective of a 40% reduction in CO2 emissions. Actually, this process of implementation can be imagined to go on for the entire century, as COP21 promises a carbon free economy sometime after 2050. However, policy implementation is difficult to achieve, especially in a heavily decentralised structure. It is likely that many governments will only deliver small changes in emission decreases, but keep lots of fossil fuel energy sources in order to maintain a positive rate of economic growth. Complete decarbonisation of entire societies is a figment of the imagination.

Experts frequently point to carbon pricing as the most cost-effective tool for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Empirical studies show that carbon pricing can successfully incentivise incremental emissions reductions. But meeting temperature targets within defined timelines as agreed under the Paris Agreement requires more than incremental improvements: it requires achieving net zero emissions within a few decades. To date, there is little evidence that carbon pricing has produced deep emission reductions, even at high prices. While much steeper carbon prices may deliver greater abatement, political economy constraints render their feasibility doubtful. An approach with multiple instruments, including technology mandates and targeted support for innovation, is indispensable to avoid path dependencies and lock-in of long-lived, high-carbon assets. We argue that carbon pricing serves several important purposes in such an instrument mix, but also that the global commitment to deep decarbonisation requires acknowledging the vital role of instruments other than carbon pricing.

1. Introduction: Decarbonising African cities in a carbon-constrained world -- PART I: DECARBONISING AFRICAN CITIES: STRATEGIES AND APPLICATIONS -- 2. Solar Urban Planning in African Cities: Challenges and Prospects -- 3. Contextualising Waste Management Operations Towards Low-Carbon African Cities -- 4. Innovative Strategies for Decarbonising the Healthcare Sector in Nigerian Cities -- 5. Optimising Hybrid Power Systems for Sustainable Operation of Remote Telecommunication Infrastructure -- 6. Performance Analysis of a Grid-Linked Microgrid System in a University Campus -- PART II: GOVERNANCE AND POLICY APPROACHES FOR DECARBONISING AFRICAN CITIES -- 7. Powering Action Towards Energising African Cities Sustainably: Perspectives from Kenya -- 8. The Political Economy of Decarbonising African Petro-cities: Governance reconfigurations for the future -- 9. To Opt-in or to Cop out: COP26 and the Policy Dynamics of Decarbonising African Cities -- 10. Conclusion: Towards a decarbonisation framework for African Cities.

Public banks are banks located within the public sphere of a state. They are pervasive, with more than 900 institutions worldwide, and powerful, with tens of trillions in assets. Public banks are neither essentially good nor bad. Rather, they are dynamic institutions, made and remade by contentious social forces. As the first single-authored book on public banks, this timely intervention examines how these institutions can confront the crisis of climate finance and catalyse a green and just transition. The author explores six case studies across the globe, demonstrating that public banks have acquired the representative structures, financial capacity, institutional knowledge, collaborative networks, and geographical reach to tackle decarbonisation, definancialisation, and democratisation. These institutions are not without contradictions, torn as they are between contending public and private interests in class-divided society. Ultimately, social forces and struggles shape how and if public banks serve the public good.

"While a number of technologies and other methods are available to achieve radical reductions in greenhouse gas emissions (most but not all involving energy efficiency, fuel switching, and decarbonised electricity), there are numerous legal impediments to implementing these technologies and methods at the necessary scale and speed. Legal Pathways to Deep Decarbonisation in Australia identifies these impediments and analyses ways to surmount them. Policy makers and lawyers can then pursue these legal pathways and allow clean technology and other methods to achieve their potential."--Publisher's website

Global climate change negotiations are delivering expectations that all nations must commit to rapidly reducing their reliance on fossil fuels. It is unclear why there is such significant variability in nations' decarbonisation ambitions. We use the lens of 'energy cultures' to explore what insights this analysis can offer to this question. We suggest that a country's 'energy culture' can be envisaged as the interplay between normative, material, institutional and policy-related attributes of the national decision-making apparatus. This provides a meta-framework which underpins our exploration of factors which previous studies suggest may shape national energy ambitions. We apply this framework to case studies of India, Denmark, China and Russia to see whether it has explanatory power across diverse cases, initially using four empirical indicators. There was no consistent correlation between the indicators and low-carbon ambitions, which led us to draw more deeply and inductively on the cultural influences evident in each nation over a 30-year period. Our findings suggest that national low-carbon ambitions are strongly cultural, contingent upon how any particular nation sees the role of energy, and the choices, policies, investments and actions that flow from this. This energy culture may constrain the extent to which nations are willing to respond to the challenge of climate change. The analysis indicates how nations require very different stimuli if they are to strengthen their low-carbon trajectories. We conclude that the concept of national energy cultures is a useful addition to approaches that are examining how to raise national low-carbon ambitions.

The gap between the GHG emissions projected in the EU Reference Scenario 2016 and the level of emissions needed to limit global warming to less than 2°C or even further to 1.5°C (Paris Agreement) is huge. The EU has already adopted a strategy for low-emission mobility to promote the decarbonisation of transport and has strengthened the EU Emission Trading System (ETS) by increasing the pace of annual reductions in allowances and adding a market stability reserve. The ETS does not directly address the transport sector, but doing so will become increasingly important as transport is electrified. The EU has also committed a growing fraction of its future budget to investments in infrastructure, and to research and innovation for a more sustainable economy. Nevertheless, much more needs to be done to deliver the target set in the European Commission's White Paper on transport of 2011 to reduce emissions from the transport sector by 60% by 2050 (compared with 1990 levels) and to ensure that EU emissions are firmly on the way to zero by that date. EASAC has developed advice for policy-makers by building on the initiatives that the EU has already taken to tackle transport emissions, and by prioritising policy options that could be adopted at EU, national and local levels both during the transition to low-carbon transport and in the long term.

Political economy has become divorced from normative political theory, resulting in an uncritical economic science and a political philosophy that has little critical purchase on actually existing economicpractices. The Foundational Economy Collective works within a framework of moral economy and uses the concepts of capabilities and use-value to radically reorient our conception of how our economy – or economies – should work.