Alevgul H. Sorman

BC3-Basque Centre for Climate Change | BCCC · Low-Carbon

Despite the efforts of the EU, disparities remain in terms of the participation of Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) researchers from both Southern and Central & Eastern Europe in research collaborations, as compared to Northern and Western European scholars. To better understand these disparities, the EU Horizon Europe SSH CENTRE project ran a...

Solar energy has become the world's cheapest and fastest scaling electricity source. Multiple societal sectors are electrifying, and the scale and pace of change give some hope of near-future rapid climate mitigation through solar rollouts despite the bleak record to date. Critiques of utility-scale solar development foreground injustices like disp...

Decoupling has been and continues to be a discourse used to prolong business as usual growth strategies without confronting systemic and behavioural changes. While decoupling narratives have emerged in the past in the form of its close siblings such as the Environmental Kuznets Curve, green economy, eco-efficiency, eco-innovation, and more recently...

While the building global momentum is calling for decarbonizing energy systems as in the cases of the Green New Deal, the European Green Deal, and more radical transformation options, Turkey’s energy futures hang on a tightrope. As a country once hailed as an economic miracle, Turkey today witnesses a failing economic model based on credit-expansio...

The challenges posed by climate change have generated many initiatives that seek to implement societal transformations. In most cases, these focus on technology developments, adoption and diffusion but neglect the social and cultural dimensions of a transformation. Insights from systems and behavioural sciences can provide valuable guidance on thes...

The term ‘Just Transition’ (JT) emerged from the 1970s North American labour movement to become a campaign for a planned energy transition that includes justice and fairness for workers. There is diversity in the JT narratives and ambitions that different actors put forward regarding its aims and strategies. This article critically reviews academic...

The ongoing expansion of renewable energies entails major spatial reconfigurations with social, environmental, and political dimensions. These emerging geographies are, however, in the process of taking shape, as their early configurations are still open to democratic intervention and contestation. While a recent line of research highlights the pro...

In recent decades, co-production has become a cornerstone both in science and policy-making, motivating further collaboration between different actors. To scrutinize such participatory processes within the climate and energy fields, we conducted a critical systematic review of 183 records, which includes scientific publications, but also other init...

Quantitative systems modelling in support of climate policy has tended to focus more on the supply side in assessing interactions among technology, economy, environment, policy and society. By contrast, the demand side is usually underrepresented, often emphasising technological options for energy efficiency improvements. In this perspective, we ar...

This perspective piece sets out to contribute to the academic and practitioner debates around energy transitions and democracy initiatives in the age of a climate crisis. For tackling present-day energy challenges in a democratic, equitable and just manner, critical social science and humanities research on meaning and materialities, new actors and...

Transitions toward a low-carbon future are not only technical and economical, but also deeply social and gendered. The gendered nature of energy transitions is often implicit and unexplored. As a corrective, this paper explores energy pathways by applying concepts from innovations and gender studies. We examine gender perspectives and niche energy...

Despite losing its low-carbon energy transition path in the last decade, Spain, since 2017, has picked up its commitment to complying with the objectives set out in the Paris Agreement for ratcheting 2030 and 2050 ambitions. This research departs from an extensive in-depth expert stakeholder engagement, proposing a research process of scoping: reac...

• Recently, all Member States have presented their national energy and climate plans (NECP) for the period 2021-2030. • The NECP of Spain has been recognized as a good practice by the European Commission and by the European Climate Foundation. • It establishes a reduction of 21% in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 with respect to 1990, a contributi...

This paper investigates the empirical and theoretical basis of the decoupling between energy throughput and economic growth, with a critical view of the use of the decoupling concept as a policy priority. We provide an analysis of the historical trends of the metabolic pattern of European economies over a period of 18 years focusing on the changes...

This paper examines the feasibility of renewable energy transition scenarios and employment requirements on a backdrop of the objectives as described by the energy and climate change plan in Catalonia (PECAC 2012–2020). The analysis uses the Multi-Scale Integrated Analysis of Societal and Ecosystem Metabolism (MuSIASEM) approach as a framework for...

Deliverable 4.1 (produced within the activities of Workpackage 4) focuses on the problematic use of concept of efficiency in the analysis of the performance of the economic process and explores possible solutions to be adopted to develop more effective methods to characterize the performance of the use of energy in modern economies. To achieve this...

The contours of Turkey's climate policy have remained almost intact over the past two decades. Being an Annex I party without any mitigation commitments, Turkey maintains a peculiar position under UNFCCC . Subsequent to 12 years of delay in signing both the Framework Convention and the Kyoto Protocol, Turkey had the highest rate of increase in gree...

Forty years after the division of Cyprus, the unstable political agenda still prevents a meaningful bi-communal discourse on the joint management of natural resources , especially water, a vital resource for all islanders. Until now, both communities have deployed unilateral, tactical methods to securitise the water discourse by linking it to high...

An alternative approach on peace building and reconciliation on the politically troubled and water-scarce Island of Cyprus

The vast majority of the countries of the world are now facing an imminent energy crisis, particularly the USA, China, India, Japan and EU countries, but also developing countries having to boost their economic growth precisely when more powerful economies will prevent them from using the limited supply of fossil energy. Despite this crisis, curren...

The belief that it is possible to have a perpetual “economic growth” based on fossil energy has been challenged since the 1970s. However, only in the last decade is this issue re-emerging once again because of the predicaments of climate change and peak oil. Many, finally start to perceive that an “economic degrowth” entailing a downscaling of the...

One can measure “energy quantities” – e.g. joules, BTU, quads – but only at a given scale and within a specific narrative about energy conversions at the time. Therefore, at the moment of generating aggregate indicators, the arithmetic summing of assessments of energy quantities referring to different scales and narratives is meaningless. This pape...

High energy prices and the growing concern for “Peak Oil” have put energy analysis, once again, on the front burner. However, before speculating about possible roadmaps regarding our energy future, it would be wise to develop better quantitative analyses. This paper flags the existence of systemic epistemological flaws in the current use of aggrega...

This paper presents examples of application of the MuSIASEM approach (Multi-Scale Integrated Analysis of Societal and Ecosystem Metabolism). The text is organized as follows: Section 1 briefly discusses, using practical examples, the theoretical challenge implied by the quantitative analysis of complex metabolic systems. Complex metabolic systems a...

This paper presents an initial challenge to tackle the every so “tricky” points encountered when dealing with energy accounting, and thereafter illustrates how such a system of accounting can be used when assessing for the metabolic changes in societies. The paper is divided in four main sections. The first three, present a general discussion on th...

Tackling the inter-communal conflict in Cyprus via the common problem of water scarcity reveals a unique opportunity. Conducting a water metabolism analysis for each community, enables to illustrate the commonalities/differences in water consumption patterns within different economic sectors and household profiles. This will reveal how both communi...

This document presents an integrated analysis of the performance of Catalonia based on an analysis of how the energy consumption (measured at the societal level for the Catalan Society) is used within both the productive sectors of the economy and the household, to generate added value, jobs, and to guarantee a given level of material standard of l...