Indra Overland

Norwegian Institute of International Affairs | NUPI · Center for Energy Research

The Arctic Environmental Responsibility Index (AERI) covers 120 oil, gas, and mining companies involved in resource extraction north of the Arctic Circle in Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Finland, Norway, Russia, and Sweden. It is based on an international expert perception survey among 173 members of the International Panel on Arctic Environmental Res...

This article carries out a multisectoral qualitative analysis (MSQA) and policy integration analysis of six sectors important for climate mitigation in Southeast Asia in order to assess the status of the climate-energy nexus in the region. It concludes that Southeast Asia will be heavily affected by climate change but the mitigation efforts of the...

This book examines Russia’s capacity to respond to a changing world, and it does so through the lens of the country’s oil industry. The reasons for this choice of topic are the place of the petroleum sector in Russian society, the place of Russian oil and gas in the world’s energy supply and the rapid pace of change in the global energy industry. A...

While most hydrogen research focuses on the technical and cost hurdles to a full-scale hydrogen economy, little consideration has been given to the geopolitical drivers and consequences of hydrogen developments. The technologies and infrastructures underpinning a hydrogen economy can take markedly different forms, and the choice over which pathway...

Political leaders describe the climate crisis as the greatest challenge of our time, but it plays only a marginal role in the foreign policy of most states and in the scholarly literature on international relations. Only 0.77 percent of the articles in five top international relations (IR) journals between 2015 and 2019 were about climate change. T...

Purpose The paper systematically examines the capacity building needs of energy and climate stakeholders in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). It looks at conditions and opportunities for improvements in institutional, organisational, technological, innovation and financing capacities. This paper provides a guide to concrete capaci...

In the wake of the 2021 coup, Myanmar experienced a renewed civil war that has fragmented the country along a myriad of old and new conflict lines. Despite the high-intensity violence across many regions of the country, China is still pursuing an ambitious connectivity project under its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI): The China-Myanmar Economic Cor...

With increasing global demand for critical materials, the call for greater transparency in global supply chains and markets – including data availability – has been growing. The global transition to renewable energy relies on a rapidly expanding and uninterrupted supply of these critical materials for manufacturing renewable energy technologies, en...

Between 2001 and 2020, the loss of ecosystems worldwide due to land degradation resulted in an economic loss of nearly USD 2 trillion. Restoring degraded lands is essential for mitigating climate change and maintaining biodiversity. Here, we evaluate the potential costs and benefits of restoring degraded lands. We provide unprecedented spatially gr...

With the transition towards a low carbon economy underway, the notion of ensuring that it is a just transition – one that is fair and equitable – has captured significant attention in recent decades. Although petrostates are a central part of the fossil fuel-based global economy, they have been largely ignored in discussions of a just transition. T...

Asia's contribution will be decisive for the global effort to mitigate climate change. But Asia lacks a country that could take the lead and inspire the rest of the region to accelerate its climate action. To identify countries that could fulfill such a role, this article takes a two‐step, mixed‐methods approach. First, an index is created to ident...

The energy transition involves the transformation of professions and labour markets, which in turn depend on the availability of a workforce with the right education and competence. This study assesses how quickly global higher education is transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy in terms of educational content. The article is based on...

Forecasts of distributed energy resource deployment are becoming increasingly important in electric power purchase plans and difficult for countries with limited data. This study utilizes the Customer Adoption Model to forecast the deployment of behind-the-meter distributed solar photovoltaics and battery energy storage systems until the year 2050...

Climate change poses a formidable threat to the Central Asian region, exacerbating preexisting vulnerabilities and necessitating enhanced adaptation efforts. The economic and environmental costs of these changing climatic conditions are substantial, compelling governments to bolster their adaptive capacity. In this study, we employ the United Natio...

As part of the European Green Deal, the European Commission has launched a tool to protect the fulfilment of Europe's climate policy targets – the carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM). It is thought that the CBAM will spark stiff resistance from Europe's external trade partners, potentially undermining the initiative. How this plays out will d...

The Working Group II contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides a comprehensive assessment of the scientific literature relevant to climate change impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. The report recognizes the interactions of climate, ecosystems and biodiversity, and human societie...

This open access book explores climate change impacts, adaptation, and mitigation in Central Asia and discusses policy options for the Central Asian governments. To address the urgent need for local scholarship on climate change in Central Asia, and in particular the need for more research by social scientists, this book features a wide range of co...

The Central Asian region has been and will continue to be significantly impacted by climate change and all the region’s countries have pledged nationally determined contributions (NDCs) under the Paris agreement. This chapter aims to assess how likely Central Asian countries are to fulfil these pledges. To answer this question, we compare the NDCs...

This chapter provides a broad introduction to the impact of climate change in Central Asia, a region that has been experiencing a greater rise in temperatures than other parts of the world. The chapter shows how climate change represents a significant threat to Central Asia, exacerbating existing economic and environmental challenges and fueling re...

While there is abundant research on the expansion of renewable energy in developed countries, little attention has been paid to the decarbonisation of energy systems in Central Asia, despite the region’s vulnerability to climate change, its rapidly growing domestic energy demand and the abundance of natural resources essential for the energy transi...

We find that both empirical results and economic theory show that carbon border adjustment mechanisms(CBAMs) will be ineffective at meeting global goals for carbon emissions reduction; but CBAMs will be effective at improving the competitiveness of the domestic industries by assuring that imports bear equal costs of carbon pricing. We elaborate two...

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the possibility of reducing Europe’s energy dependence on Russian resources has been hotly debated. The fossil fuel industries received most attention as European Union leaders first introduced gradual sanctions on Russian coal and later on oil and gas, while Russia responded with supply cuts. However,...

The race to rapidly decarbonise and digitalise the global economy by 2030 to avoid temperatures rising above 1.5C has been subsumed by geopolitics that remains anchored in realist power struggles, now revolving around Sino-American hyper- competition. The Russian invasion of Ukraine further undermined interdependence and prompted unprecedented leve...

Carbon border levies have been suggested as an important tool for ramping up climate action. Such a levy is being negotiated as part of the EU’s Green Deal, with input from public consultations. The success of the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) will depend on its design and acceptance. While most analyses focus on resistance from th...

The energy transition is progressing slowly in the ten member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). To achieve ASEAN's target of 23% renewables in the primary energy supply by 2025, the region would need to invest USD 27 billion in renewable energy every year. However, the ASEAN countries attracted no more than USD 8 billion...

The European Union (EU) plans to activate a carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) in January 2023. This is meant to secure fair competition for European energy-intensive industries, incentivize countries both inside and outside the EU to cut emissions, and hinder carbon leakage from the EU. Early reactions from some large economies suggest that...

Nobel Memorial Prize winner William Nordhaus and others have proposed a climate club as the ultimate climate-mitigation measure. Meanwhile, the European Union (EU) is pressing on with the creation of a carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) that would put pressure on the rest of the world to introduce the same level of carbon pricing as the EU....

The energy transition literature assumes that renewable energy resources are more evenly distributed globally than fossil fuels. This assumption implies that the shift from fossil fuels to renewables will enable more countries to pursue energy self-sufficiency and end their dependence on imported energy. However, if the assumption is wrong, the ene...

The European Commission has announced far-reaching reforms to accelerate the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Among the proposals constituting the European Green Deal is the adoption of a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) to prevent carbon leakage. In practice, however, CBAM will not only act as a shield for the European Emissions Tra...

Special economic zones (SEZs) play a pivotal role in the development of many emerging economies. However, many SEZs are located in remote locations in authoritarian states where independent environmental assessment is difficult. Few studies assess the environmental impact of SEZs and as a result limited empirical evidence is available. This paper f...

This article assesses the extent to which the academic community engaged with climate change in Central Asia between 1991 and 2021. The article finds that climate change has been neglected in the field of Central Asia area studies. Out of a total 13,488 journal articles in eight key journals for Central Asia research, only 33 articles (0.24%) were...

The power sector is one of the major contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions while also being vulnerable to climate change in its own right. Accordingly, the global power sector needs to accelerate decarbonization. This paper assesses power sector pathways to net-zero emissions by 2050 for the Association of Southeast Asia Nations (ASEAN) u...

This data article provides an overview of fossil fuel trends in Central Asia from 2010 to 2019. Data on the production, consumption, export and import of coal, natural gas and oil are summarised for Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. While promoting renewable energy, Central Asia continues to rely on and expand the use...

This dataset brings together the underlying data for CADGAT data article 28, covering trends in fossil fuel production, consumption, exports and imports in Central Asian countries for the period 2010-2020. These data are published under a CC-BY open access license.

By 2020, coal mining and power generation had been growing in Southeast Asia for decades and were projected to rise to new heights of prominence in regional energy systems, weakening the energy security of all states in the region except Indonesia, jeopardizing the NDCs of the ASEAN states under the Paris Agreement and deepening existing domestic p...

The energy transition is causing a surge in demand for minerals for clean energy technologies, giving rise to concerns about the sources and security of supplies of critical materials. Although Central Asia was one of the Soviet Union's main sources of metals and industrial minerals, it has been forgotten in contemporary global critical materials a...

To ensure sufficient power generation capacity and minimize the risk of blackouts, many countries have introduced capacity mechanisms that provide payments for power plants according to their installed generation capacity. Capacity mechanisms can have different designs, but all have the same purpose—to incentivize sufficient infrastructure investme...

This study analyzes the factors that have facilitated Vietnam’s recent rapid solar and wind power expansion and draws policy insights for other member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). A policy-mix analysis focusing on targets, incentive instruments, enabling regulations, and policy implementation is carried out, informe...

Africa has only contributed a small fraction of global greenhouse gas emissions yet faces disproportionate risks from climate change. This imbalance is one of many inequities associated with climate change and raises questions concerning the origin, distribution and thematic prioritization of funding for climate-change research on Africa. This arti...

Little is known about how the environmental approaches of foreign investors in developing countries are formed. The objective of this study is to conceptualize and investigate the drivers of the environmental performance of foreign firms. This is done through a comparative analysis of the environmental profiles of Chinese and Japanese firms in Myan...

This article investigates the Russian reaction to the Third Energy Package (TEP) of the European Union (EU). This legislation aimed at integrating the EU’s internal gas market but also became a game-changer for EU–Russia energy relations. The framing strategies through which the Russian regime has made sense of TEP are explored and the entanglement...

This paper studies socioeconomic and environmental changes in the neighboring areas Bangladesh-Myanmar border from 2012 to 2019, thus covering the period before and after the 2017 Rakhine conflict in Myanmar and outflux of refugees across the border to Bangladesh. Given the scarcity and costliness of traditional data collection methods in such conf...

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) and commitment to sustainable development have become integral elements of long-term corporate strategies across sectors and countries. The CSR policies of Russian vertically integrated oil companies (VIOCs) are of particular interest because these companies share some characteristics of international oil compa...

Along with financing hard infrastructure projects, Beijing also promotes soft power projects in the form of people-to-people initiatives. However, such projects are low priority within the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Central Asia. The Confucius Institutes, which appear to be an important vehicle for Chinese soft power in the region, are not d...

Europa er Norges viktigste marked, og europeiske land er – sammen med USA – Norges viktigste allierte i utenrikspolitikken. Gitt Norges tilkobling til EU via EØS-avtalen, Schengen, og Klimaavtalen, så vil enhver endring i EUs mål og virkemåte påvirke Norge. EUs grønne giv (European Green Deal - EGD) er en av de mest omfattende endringene av EU på l...

Is Russia failing to see the accelerating changes in the global energy system brought on by climate policy and energy technology learning curves? Is it prepared for the impact of these changes on demand for Russian fossil fuel exports? As the world’s largest fossil fuel exporter, Russia will be affected by the energy transition more than any other...

The burgeoning literature on the geopolitics of the energy transition now numbers more than 200 publications (Vakulchuk et al, 2020). Many of these works conjecture boldly about how the replacement of fossil fuels by renewable energy will affect international affairs. However, many of these conjectures rest on unstated assumptions about the global...

AEO6 explores four scenarios – three of which were modelled in AEO5 as well, plus a new scenario focused on attaining Sustainable Development Goal 7, “Affordable and Clean Energy”. Starting with roughly the same suite of technologies for the same population and GDP extrapolations, the four scenarios explore different strategies and escalating level...

This article studies the impact of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) on economic actors in Myanmar. It hypothesizes that the BRI has strong transformative potential, because Chinese projects are likely to transform Myanmar's economy on different scales and influence the allocation of economic benefits and losses for different actors. The study...

Data on funding flows for research on climate change issues in Africa.

Research on the adoption of the bicycle as a means of transport has been booming in high-income countries. However, little is known about bicycle adoption in lower-income countries where air pollution is high and cycling infrastructure is poor. Understanding the drivers of cycling adoption in developing economies can increase the efficiency of tran...

Energy democracy' has evolved from a slogan used by activists demanding a greater say in energy-related decision-making to a term used in policy documents and scholarly literature on energy governance and energy transitions. This article reviews the academic literature using a combination of three methodological elements: (1) keyword searches of ma...

Energy democracy' has evolved from a slogan used by activists demanding a greater say in energy-related decision-making to a term used in policy documents and scholarly literature on energy governance and energy transitions. This article reviews the academic literature using a combination of three methodological elements: (1) keyword searches of ma...