Hydrogen is considered a promising energy carrier that can potentially contribute to low-carbon energy systems and achieving climate goals. Its introduction, however, is complex, involving multiple emerging niches and developments across various sociotechnical systems. Despite its significance, the multi-system nature of hydrogen has received limited attention in sustainability transition scholarship. This paper addresses this knowledge gap by examining the emerging hydrogen transition in the Netherlands from a multi-system sociotechnical perspective. To achieve this, we adopted a framework that considers multiple niches and sociotechnical systems in parallel, using Event Sequence Analysis (ESA). The analysis provides a systematic reconstruction of (niche-)processes as networks of events for analysing hydrogen niche formation from 2001 to 2020 across four sociotechnical systems: industry, electricity, transport, and the built environment. The results reveal that, despite positive discourse and ambitious plans, investments and implementation remained limited. We provide possible explanations for this progress through a multi-system lens.

Many Higher Education Institutions utilize living labs to address complex societal challenges and foster innovative and sustainable solutions on campus. Despite the perceived benefits of campus environments for transdisciplinary real-world innovation, living labs often encounter challenges. As such, there is a growing need for more knowledge on facilitating these on-campus initiatives in different development phases. Here, enabling factors for on-campus living labs are investigated and their salience across the living labs’ development process established. First, a systematic literature review was conducted, identifying sixteen enabling factors. The most pertinent ones were stakeholders and networks, coordination on the organizational level, a conducive work culture, co-creation and collaboration, and suitable methods and practices for living labs. Second, all factors’ relevance across living labs’ development phases were assessed through the input of an expert panel. To that end, a mapping exercise was developed, which can in itself serve as a discussion tool for living lab practitioners. The results suggested that the initiation phase relies on leadership, coordination, stakeholder engagement, a conducive work culture, and funding. In contrast, operational phases were enabled by shared understanding, internal management, stakeholder collaboration, methodological appropriateness, and evaluation. Lastly, the dissemination phase hinged on transfer, scaling, evaluation, learning, and bridging stakeholders and contexts. These insights contribute to a better understanding of enabling factors for campus living labs during different phases of development, offering tailored guidance for stakeholders while stressing adaptability to local contexts. Subsequently, campus living labs may be better equipped to effectively generate sustainable solutions for the complex societal questions of this time.

In this study participatory backcasting was refined to combine the use of existing visions in combination with stakeholder engagement and road-mapping and applied to the regional energy transition in Indonesia’s South Kalimantan Province, where the gross regional domestic product strongly depends on coal mining. Based on document analysis, interviews, consultations, and a focus group discussion, we determined necessary changes, driving factors and challenges, and co-created a roadmap towards the preferred Net Zero Emission vision. The roadmap proposes: (1) to increase the capacity of renewable energy, particularly wind and solar, along with battery energy storage systems; (2) to transform economic activities currently based on coal towards bioenergy hubs and to build a regional economy based on renewable energy; (3) to enhance the quality of data on renewable energy potential, power grid flexibility, and variable renewable plants, and (4) to shift culture and behaviour towards energy saving, energy communities, electrification of lifestyles, and the use of renewable energy in industry. Our study contributes to the literature on participatory backcasting by a case on the clean energy transition in fossil fuelrich nations in the Global South and advances backcasting by using existing visions instead of generating one or several new visions.

Living labs are becoming increasingly popular as suitable arrangements for cocreation and innovation by bringing multiple stakeholders together to work on (solving) complex societal challenges. University campuses are ideal places for living labs, and many universities use such arrangements for various experiments in relation to sustainable future initiatives. Despite the popularity of the living lab concept, much remains unclear about their ways of operation and their potential to innovate. This study aims to show some of the current challenges of on-campus living labs involved with experiments concerning the energy transition. A total of six different living labs were examined based on semistructured interviews with different stakeholders ranging from researchers to operational staff members. Our results show several internal and external challenges, such as the living lab set-up and multiple operational challenges concerning administration, coordination and governance. More external challenges include the overall embeddedness of living labs within the more traditional organizational structure of the university and the tensions between academic and operational processes. Despite these challenges, we conclude that a university campus is still a fruitful place for living labs to cocreate and innovate. By creating awareness and understanding of the challenges living labs face, future initiatives may be facilitated better so that campus living labs are able to unlock their potential to innovate and contribute to societal challenges sooner rather than later.

Although causal evidence synthesis is critical for the policy sciences—whether it be analysis for policy or analysis of policy—its repeatable, systematic, and transparent execution remains challenging due to the growing volume, variety, and velocity of policy-relevant evidence generation as well as the complex web of relationships within which policies are usually situated. To address these shortcomings, we develop a novel, semi-automated approach to synthesizing causal evidence from policy-relevant documents. Specifically, we propose the use of natural language processing (NLP) for the extraction of causal evidence and subsequent homogenization of the text; causal mapping for the collation, visualization, and summarization of complex interdependencies within the policy system; and graph analytics for further investigation of the structure and dynamics of the causal map. We illustrate this approach by applying it to a collection of 28 articles on the emissions trading scheme (ETS), a policy instrument of increasing importance for climate change mitigation. In all, we find 300 variables and 284 cause-effect pairs in our input dataset (consisting of 4524 sentences), which are reduced to 70 unique variables and 119 cause-effect pairs after homogenization. We create a causal map depicting these relationships and analyze it to demonstrate the perspectives and policy-relevant insights that can be obtained. We compare these with select manually conducted, previous meta-reviews of the policy instrument, and find them to be not only broadly consistent but also complementary. We conclude that, despite remaining limitations, this approach can help synthesize causal evidence for policy analysis, policy making, and policy research.

Current bioenergy development has emphasized on degraded land, since the sustainability of bioenergy in the forest sector remains a subject of debate related with emissions and deforestation risk. Thus, this study aims to open new perspectives of how degraded land and social forestry can be potentially combined to significantly impact the energy transition and environmental-societal enhancement. Considering sustainability of Bali as a small island with its unique customary governance structure, a model of biomass energy optimization using geospatial fuzzy-multicriteria analysis was developed to select potential green energy source sites. Firstly, potential degraded land and social forestry were mapped to identify potential feedstock, then normalized using Euclidian Distance and Fuzzy Logic based on identified five sustainability criteria. They are availability of raw material, road, port, transmission, and demand proximities. Meanwhile, using identified three restriction criteria, i.e. protected area, slope and land-use restrictions, a restriction map was developed. The two maps were then integrated using Geospatial-based multicriteria analysis, fuzzy logic and Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) weighting method, to further identify potential green energy source map. The integration shown a significant increase of 60 % in land availability for bioenergy development. Results of study recognized potential 36,527 ha of degraded land; 21,671 ha of social forestry; and 40 optimal locations for bioenergy facilities, considering various spatial and temporal criteria. To conclude, the identified 120 social forestry sites in Bali involving 78,385 household provide opportunity to a community based socio-economic coupled with revitalizing environment efforts, which lead to massive net zero emissions community participation. Further, the integration of social forestry and degraded land should be highly recommended to policy maker in bioenergy development.

Renewable electricity generation will need to be rapidly scaled to address climate change and other environmental challenges. Doing so effectively will require an understanding of resource availability. We review estimates for renewable electricity of the global technical potential, defined as the amount of electricity that could be produced with current technologies when accounting for geographical and technical limitations as well as conversion efficiencies; economic potential, which also includes cost; and feasible potential, which accounts for societal and environmental constraints. We consider utility-scale and rooftop solar photovoltaics, concentrated solar power, onshore and offshore wind, hydropower, geothermal electricity, and ocean (wave, tidal, ocean thermal energy conversion, and salinity gradient energy) technologies. We find that the reported technical potential for each energy resource ranges over several orders of magnitude across and often within technologies. Therefore, we also discuss the main factors explaining why authors find such different results. According to this review and on the basis of the most robust studies, we find that technical potentials for utility-scale solar photovoltaic, concentrated solar power, onshore wind, and offshore wind are above 100 PWh/year. Hydropower, geothermal electricity, and ocean thermal energy conversion have technical potentials above 10 PWh/year. Rooftop solar photovoltaic, wave, and tidal have technical potentials above 1 PWh/year. Salinity gradient has a technical potential above 0.1 PWh/year. The literature assessing the global economic potential of renewables, which considers the cost of each renewable resource, shows that the economic potential is higher than current and near-future electricity demand. Fewer studies have calculated the global feasible potential, which considers societal and environmental constraints. While these ranges are useful for assessing the magnitude of available energy sources, they may omit challenges for large-scale renewable portfolios.

The current focus of offshore wind industry and academia lies on regions with strong winds, neglecting areas with mild resources. Photovoltaics' cost reductions have shown that even mild resources can be harnessed economically, especially where electricity prices are high. Here, we study the technical and economic potential of offshore wind power in Indonesia as an example of mild-resource areas, using bias-corrected ERA5 data, turbine-specific power curves, and a detailed cost model. We show that low-wind-speed turbines could produce up to 6,816 TWh/year, which is 25 times Indonesia's electricity generation in 2018 and 3 times the projected 2050 generation, and up to 166 PWh/year globally. Although not yet competitive against current offshore turbines, low-wind turbines could become a crucial piece of the global climate mitigation effort in regions with vast marine areas and high electricity prices. As low-wind-speed turbines are not yet on the market, we recommend prioritizing their development.