Benjamin Sovacool

University of Sussex · Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU)

Decarbonising industrial clusters is critical to achieving the UK’s net-zero industrial strategy. This study focuses on Teesside, an industrial cluster in Northeast England, analysing its transition through the framework of the Sociology of Expectations (SoE). The research investigates the role of public and private stakeholders in driving decarbon...

Cities are moving to implement just urban transitions, but we lack consensus on how policy evaluation practices can center justice and create accountability toward desired climate futures. Here, we introduce climate justice imaginaries as a novel tool to root policy evaluation in local understandings of the just city. We use an original mixed-metho...

Recent research underscores the importance of ensuring that net-zero pathways are perceived as legitimate and socially acceptable, as public attitudes can trigger significant backlash. This article investigates the narratives surrounding industrial decarbonization in the UK within Twitter’s ‘digital town square.’ Intermediary agents play a crucial...

Technological advancements offer the opportunity for interventions to reduce and potentially even counteract the impacts of climate change. However, advancements that can facilitate the adaptation of human and natural ecosystems to climate change, and possibly lessen the intensity and damaging impacts of extreme weather events, come with social, te...

Climate intervention technologies such as carbon dioxide removal and solar geoengineering are becoming more actively considered as solutions to global warming. The demographic aspects of the public serve as a core determinant of social vulnerability and the ability for people to cope with, or fail to cope with, exposure to heat waves, air pollution...

Some experts contend that addressing global climate challenges requires consideration of technologies such as Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) and, possibly, Solar Radiation Modification (SRM). Previous studies, primarily centered on the OECD region, have indicated that most of these technologies are contentious, eliciting low levels of public support....

Cities are moving toward the implementation of more just urban climate actions, but the politics and processes of operationalizing climate justice in practice remain understudied. Here we examine the implementation of climate justice through Boston’s Building Emissions Reduction and Disclosure Ordinance (BERDO), a landmark Building Performance Stan...

Based on conversations with 38 interview respondents, four focus groups and participant observation, this article examines intensive solar energy development in east Riverside County, California. Focusing on the Desert Center area, it argues that environmental policy, expressed through market-imperatives and bureaucratically-centered modeling scien...

Many actors have recently launched significant new initiatives in the domain of climate change and health. Given this important nexus, we undertook a review of funding patterns from 1985 – 2022, using the NIH RePORTER database for the United States and the Dimensions database globally. This includes an assessment of more than 9 million publicly fun...

Sub-Saharan Africa is generally one of the most electricity deprived regions in the world. Since the 1990s, the World Bank and other relevant and respected multilateral organisations have consistently advocated that the required finance to develop sub-Saharan Africa's essential electricity capacity should be sourced from the private sector. However...

Purpose – This article explores three operations and supply chain management (OSCM) approaches for meeting the 2°C targets to counteract climate change: adaptation (adjusting to climatic impacts); mitigation (innovating towards low-carbon practices); and carbon removing negative emissions technologies (NETs). We suggest that adaptation nor mitigati...

As emerging methods for carbon removal and controversial proposals around solar radiation modification are gaining traction in climate assessments and policy debates, a better understanding of how the public perceives these approaches is needed. Relying on qualitative data from 44 focus groups (n = 323 respondents), triangulated with a survey condu...

The Electrical Power Grid, Including the national electricity transmission and distribution (T&D) network, is a massive network of infrastructure that most scholars and practitioners treat as disconnected from energy justice concerns. But underlying this infrastructure are a series of unseen justice dimensions. For example, stronger and more resili...

As countries and communities grapple with climate change, they seek to rapidly decarbonize their economies and cultures. A low‐carbon future will likely depend on more distributed solar energy, the electrification of mobility, and more efficient homes and buildings. But what emergent risks are evident within this low‐carbon society? This explorator...

Solar geoengineering maintains a vocal presence as a stop-gap measure in assessments of climate and sustainability action. In this paper, we map prospective benefits and risks, and corresponding governance approaches, regarding three major proposals for solar geoengineering (stratospheric aerosol injection, marine cloud brightening, and a space-bas...

The need for public engagement is increasingly evident as discussions intensify around emerging methods for carbon dioxide removal and controversial proposals around solar geoengineering. Based on 44 focus groups in 22 countries across the Global North and Global South (N = 323 participants), this article traces public preferences for a variety of...

Carbon removal is emerging as a pillar of governmental and industry commitments toward achieving Net Zero targets. Drawing from 44 focus groups in 22 countries, we map technical and societal issues that a representative sample of publics raise on five major types of carbon removal (forests, soils, direct air capture, enhanced weathering, and bioene...

Industrial decarbonization and the net-zero climate strategy has arisen as one of the most important policy challenges of the modern era. But how do industrial decarbonization policy efforts link with other issues? The UK claims to be the first major economy in the world to posit a net-zero target. In this paper, drawn from an original qualitative...

Novel, potentially radical climate intervention technologies like carbon dioxide removal and solar geoengineering are attracting attention as the adverse impacts of climate change are increasingly felt. The ability of publics, particularly in the Global South, to participate in discussions about research, policy, and deployment is restricted amidst...

A rapid phase-out of unabated coal use is essential to limit global warming to below 2 °C. This review presents a comprehensive assessment of coal transitions in mitigation scenarios consistent with the Paris Agreement, using data from more than 1500 publicly available scenarios generated by more than 30 integrated assessment models. Our ensemble a...

Solar geoengineering (also known as solar radiation modification) is garnering more attention (and controversy) among media and policymakers in response to the impacts of climate change. Such debates have become more prominent following the first-ever field trials of stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) in 2022. How the lay public perceives solar...

This paper explores the benefits, barriers, and justice impacts of industrial decarbonization via hydrogen and carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS) via European industrial firms located in UK clusters.

This study examines the political economy of decarbonization in eight countries over the period 2000 to 2021/ 2022 that have already achieved a national net-zero transition. These countries are Bhutan, Suriname, Panama, Guyana, Comoros, Gabon, Madagascar, and Niue. It utilizes an analytical method of a rich, interdisciplinary and systematized liter...

Energy equity and justice have become priority considerations for policymakers, practitioners, and scholars alike. To ensure that energy equity is incorporated into actual decisions and analysis, it is necessary to design, use, and continually improve energy equity metrics. In this article, we review the literature and practices surrounding such me...

Public perception of emerging climate technologies, such as greenhouse gas removal (GGR) and solar radiation management (SRM), will strongly influence their future development and deployment. Studying perceptions of these technologies with traditional survey methods is challenging, because they are largely unknown to the public. Social media data p...

Given the inadequacy of current patterns of climate mitigation, calls for rapid climate protection are beginning to explore and endorse potentially radical options. Based on fieldwork involving original expert interviews (N = 23) and extensive site visits (N = 23) in Australia, this empirical study explores four types of climate interventions spann...

Despite increasing policy emphasis on creating a more equitable society as a key component of the energy transition, there is still a dearth of assessments investigating the equity outcomes of decarbonisation scenarios and community scale Just Transition case studies, and those focusing on both energy and transport. This work seeks to fill this gap...

Digitalisation provides opportunities to decarbonise energy and, simultaneously, address social exclusion and inequality—but it is unclear whether and how these opportunities are realised. Three case studies investigate whether ongoing energy infrastructure digitalisation processes are accommodating commoning or enclosure, using a continuum of comm...

The ongoing global race for bigger and better artificial intelligence (AI) systems is expected to have a profound societal and environmental impact by altering job markets, disrupting business models, and enabling new governance and societal welfare structures that can affect global consensus for climate action pathways. However, the current AI sys...

Accelerating energy transitions that are both sustainable and just remains an important challenge, and social innovation can have a key role in this transition. Here, we examine the diversity and potential of social innovation in energy systems transformation, synthesizing original mixed methods data from expert interviews, document analysis, socia...

Energy and mobility poverty limits people's choices and opportunities and negatively impinges upon structural economic and social welfare patterns. It also hampers the ability of planners to implement more equitable and just decarbonization pathways. Research has revealed that climate policies have imposed a financial burden on low-income and other...

Poverty impacts people’s choices and opportunities and can perpetuate a disadvantaged status. Poverty remains a prevalent global issue due to disproportionate wealth distribution, which often translates to inequality in energy consumption and emissions. This research investigates if low-income households and minorities from four countries with very...

Institutional theory, behavioral science, sociology and even political science all emphasize the importance of actors in achieving social change. Despite this salience, the actors involved in researching, promoting, or deploying negative emissions and solar geoengineering technologies remain underexplored within the literature. In this study, based...

Concrete is the most highly used construction material globally. This is largely due to its durability, versatility and manufacture from inexpensive and readily available materials. Although concrete has become an essential and ubiquitous construction material for modern society, its use has significant environmental impacts. The full cement and co...

Conversations on how to assess, innovate, and develop policies for carbon removal are for now largely confined to the Global North – reflecting a concentration of academic interest (and concern), innovation capacity, early funding initiatives, and policy path-dependence in climate, energy, and land-use. However, future population growth, emissions...