Carbon markets have emerged as a key policy instrument to combat global emissions by treating greenhouse gases (GHGs) as tradable commodities, encouraging activities that reduce, avoid, or capture emissions. Rooted in the Kyoto Protocol and reinforced by the Paris Agreement, carbon markets operate through compliance (cap-and-trade) and voluntary mechanisms, engaging diverse stakeholders — project developers, verifiers, standard bodies, and credit buyers. These markets foster climate action by enabling companies and individuals to offset their emissions while promoting renewable energy, afforestation, and energy efficiency projects. Technological advancements like blockchain-based carbon credits and tokenization have enhanced market transparency and liquidity. However, challenges persist, including conflicts of interest in project validation, limited participation of small-scale players, and regulatory ambiguities. Strengthening governance, ensuring inclusivity for marginalized groups, and promoting micro-carbon projects are essential for their success. With India’s commitment to achieving net-zero emissions by 2070, carbon markets hold immense potential to accelerate climate goals, driving both environmental sustainability and economic growth. The present article provides a broad understanding of carbon markets, covering their origin and evolution, current status, processes, stakeholders, as well as the lacunae and challenges they face, along with future prospects.
The built environment is a critical frontier for climate change mitigation and adaptation, with residential buildings accounting for a substantial portion of global energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. This paper presents a critical review of contemporary literature (2020-2025) synthesizing advancements in climate-resilient housing through integrated architectural and renewable energy solutions. A systematic analysis of 51 studies examines three core areas: passive and active architectural design for thermal resilience; the role of decentralized renewable energy in enhancing autonomy; and the socio-technical, policy, and governance dimensions of implementation. The present review identifies a paradigm shift from static efficiency toward dynamic, adaptive building systems, highlighting the efficacy of bioclimatic design, smart materials, and AI-driven management. Decentralized solar energy is underscored as fundamental for decarbonization and energy security, though its success depends on supportive policies, community engagement, and equitable finance. Persistent gaps are noted, including the need for holistic lifecycle assessments, scalable models for low-income contexts, and stronger integration of technical and social equity approaches. The review concludes by advocating for a transformative shift toward adaptive, regenerative, and just residential environments.
Decentralized bio-hydrogen systems, integrating localized biomass gasification, hydrogen cogeneration, and HVAC absorption cooling, offer a viable pathway for decarbonizing commercial real estate. However, existing control strategies fail to co-optimize second-law thermodynamic exergy efficiency with dynamic grid carbon intensity and fluctuating carbon-tax pricing, a gap consistent with the broader finding that carbon-pricing frameworks only translate into emission reductions when paired with dispatchable technology able to respond to the price signal. This paper formulates a nonlinear thermo-economic optimization model for building-integrated bio-hydrogen systems operating under regional emission-trading schemes, together with an explicit capital-recovery-factor-based definition of the Levelized Cost of Building Energy (LCOBE) tying the dispatch objective to the building's actual 20-year capital and financing profile. Evaluated across three distinct climate zones (Cold, Mixed, Tropical), the proposed Carbon-Exergy Co-Optimization (CECO) algorithm increases annual exergy efficiency by an average of 21% relative to conventional heat-led operation, and reduces LCOBE by up to 21.4% under a strict $130/ton carbon-tax framework.
Open access
Integrated Energy Systems Optimization
Thermodynamic and Exergetic Analyses of Power and Cooling Systems
Asad Mujeeb, Jamiu O. Oladigbolu, Mutiu Shola Bakare, Abduljelil Atima Ibrahim
As the global push for carbon neutrality accelerates, energy efficiency has become essential for sustainable development, especially for nations like Nigeria that face rising energy demands and significant environmental challenges. This study explores how integrating energy efficiency with carbon neutrality can support Nigeria's strategic energy goals while offering global lessons for other countries facing similar challenges, focusing on key sectors, including industry, transport, and power generation. The study systematically examines the impacts of renewable energy (RE) technologies, like solar, wind, and hydropower—alongside policy reforms, technological innovations, and demand-side management strategies to advance energy efficiency in Nigeria. Key findings include the identification of strategic policy frameworks, technological solutions, and the transformative role of green hydrogen in decarbonizing hard-to-electrify sectors. The study also emphasizes the importance of international climate finance, decentralized RE systems like solar mini-grids for improving energy access, and economic opportunities for job creation in the RE sector. Furthermore, it highlights the need for behavioral changes, community engagement, and consistent policy implementation to address infrastructure gaps and drive energy efficiency goals. The novelty of this research lies in its scenario-based analysis of Nigeria's low-carbon transition, detailing both the opportunities and challenges, such as policy inconsistencies, infrastructure deficits, and financial constraints. The findings stress the importance of international collaboration, technological advancements, and targeted investments to overcome these challenges. By offering actionable insights and strategic recommendations, this study provides a roadmap for policymakers, industry stakeholders, and researchers to drive Nigeria towards a sustainable, carbon-neutral future by 2050.
A lack of data security and interoperability are significant challenges in low-carbon building design due to the involvement of numerous architects, engineers, and carbon auditors. This study proposes a novel framework that integrates blockchain, building information modelling (BIM), and life cycle assessment (LCA) to enhance data management and decision-making for low-carbon building design. Blockchain, as a distributed ledger, ensures data security by maintaining an immutable record of architectural design changes, energy system configurations, and carbon footprints. BIM visualises all the design information in a three-dimensional model to ensure real-time updates of energy and carbon performance. LCA assesses the trade-off between embodied carbon and operating carbon emissions across a building’s life span, optimising architectural and energy system design decisions. The proposed framework establishes a secure and transparent workflow by integrating blockchain, BIM, and LCA into an iterative design process. Smart contracts facilitate the automatic verification of design parameters, enabling architects and engineers to adjust their designs when carbon footprint targets and energy-saving requirements are unmet. Additionally, the framework incorporates a database of future weather profiles, material properties, and inventory information to support accurate and informed decision-making. This study enhances data security, improves interoperability and supports the iterative refinement of low-carbon building designs. The framework was validated on an industrial building project, demonstrating its effectiveness in designing low-carbon buildings and its potential to contribute to global net-zero ambitions. By offering a structured approach to integrating blockchain, BIM, and LCA, this study offers valuable insights for practitioners and researchers in the architecture, engineering, and construction industries.
Yasir Habib, Noor Raida Abd Rahman, Shujahat Haider Hashmi, Minhaj Ali
Carbon neutrality and sustainable development goals have become globally imperative, as evidenced by the Paris Agreement, and the Nationally Determined Contributions mechanism. At the recently ended COP28 climate summit, the majority of the participating countries encountered these challenges through financial commitments to attain their objectives of carbon neutrality for sustainable development. Green finance and environmental decentralization play key roles in realizing these targets. The core focus of this study is to demystify the impacts of green finance and environmental decentralization on sustainable development by employing a panel dataset comprising 44 OECD countries, spanning 1995-2022. Ecological footprint serves as an indicator of sustainable development. Financial investment directed towards climate change mitigation and climate change adaptation technologies with alternative output-input green finance indicators are used as measures for green finance. A new index was devised that incorporates multiple indicators of environmental decentralization to gauge its influence on sustainable development. Using OLS, Oster coefficient stability, Lewbel 2SLS, and Kiviet instrumental variable techniques, our findings demonstrate that green finance significantly enhances sustainable development across countries. The empirical findings reveal that green finance and environmental decentralization exhibit a positive, statistically significant influence on sustainable development in OECD countries, while also playing a mitigating role in the reduction of environmental degradation. Considering these findings, it is imperative that OECD countries formulate and implement policies that foster green financing and empower local governments. This formulation and authorization are crucial for reducing pollution through the stimulation of innovation in climate change mitigation and adaptation technologies. In doing so, these policies will substantially reinforce the achievement of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals 9 and 12.
Environmental impact and sustainability challenges in the cryptocurrencies has become increasingly examined in the literature. However, studies of the multiple attribute group decision making (MAGDM) method for major selection of cryptocurrencies in advancing sustainability are still at an early stage. In particular, research on the fuzzy-MAGDM method in the evaluation of sustainability in cryptocurrencies is scarce. This paper adds contributions by developing a novel MAGDM approach to evaluate the sustainability development of major cryptocurrencies. It proposes a similarity measure for interval-valued Pythagorean fuzzy numbers (IVPFNs) based on whitenisation weight function and membership function in grey systems theory for IVPFNs. It further developed a novel generalised interval-valued Pythagorean fuzzy weighted grey similarity (GIPFWGS) measure approach to provide a more rigorous evaluation in complex decision marking problem with embedding ideal solution and membership degree. It also conducts a sustainability evaluation model of major cryptocurrencies as a numerical application and performs a robustness assessment with different variations of the expert's weight to test how different values of parameter θ can affect the ranking results of alternatives. The results suggest that Stellar is the most sustainable cryptocurrency, while Bitcoin with its intensive energy consumption, high mining cost and high computing power provides the least effective support for its sustainable development. A comparative analysis with the average value method and Euclidean distance method was performed to validate the reliability of the proposed decision-making model and provides evidence that the GIPFWGS has better fault tolerance.
Abstract Combined heat and power (CHP) systems, an effective way of meeting high energy demand with high efficiency, were adapted to existing large service buildings in most studies. Because of the large daily and seasonal fluctuations in energy and electricity demands of the buildings, optimization problems have come into view and have been studied. This study propounds a holistic design solution for the CHP systems' inadequacy to meet varying consumer energy demands in residential and the excessive electricity demand created by cryptocurrency mining. In addition, the study defines the possible high efficiency and sustainability for residentials producing and consuming heat and electricity by themselves. An energy‐conservative three‐block residential and a CHP system were projected together by a holistic view balancing the residencies' peak thermal demand to the thermal output capacity of the CHP system. The investment return rate of the CHP system was maximized by optimizing the thermodynamic efficiencies and maximizing the electric generation for cryptocurrency mining. The energetic efficiency increased from 40% to an energy utilization factor of 83%, and exergetic efficiency increased from 39% to 42%. The waste‐exergy ratio decreased from 61% to 58%. The engine's environmental effect factor was 1.56 and reduced to 1.38 with the CHP system. The exergetic sustainability index was improved from 0.64 to 0.72. The benefit–cost ratio was estimated as 1.6, with an internal return rate of 79%. Holistic designs considering common values should be considered to improve sustainability.
Nicolás Malz, Felipe Corral Montoya, Paola Yanguas-Parra, Pao-Yu Oei
Juxtaposing China’s current situation and policies toward coal and renewables at home and abroad, we argue that China remains in a paradoxical state of carbon lock-in. We analyze the techno-economic, institutional and political factors that contribute to China’s coal-related policies following a novel approach that blends different theories and frameworks to establish an interdisciplinary dialogue between various strands of research that were hitherto unconnected. This is accomplished by applying a political economy framework through the lens of techno-institutional carbon lock-in theory in three case studies encompassing China itself, as well as China’s climate and energy policy abroad in Pakistan and Mozambique. The article draws four major conclusions about China’s energy paradox: 1) An imperative for economic growth lies at the heart of the Chinese governance system’s incentive structure, which has resulted in a coal-based energy and industrial policy. 2) China’s government should use the experimental, decentralized nature of its regionally-decentralized regime and energy sector to their advantage by promoting disruption rather than incumbency. 3) To address the structural and institutional deficiencies that maintain or even strengthen carbon lock-in, energy governance should be shaped around the primary challenge of strengthening renewable energy advocates throughout all levels of government. 4) The discussion of coal financing abroad must now go beyond the discontinuation of new projects; the building of alternative cleaner projects should be considered and the ones in progress should be halted.
Massimo Pizzol, Romain Sacchi, Susanne Köhler, Annika Anderson Erjavec
Given a fixed product system model, with the current computational framework of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) the potential environmental impacts associated to demanding one thousand units of a product will be one thousand times larger than what results from demanding 1 unit only – a linear relationship. However, due to economies of scale, industrial synergies, efficiency gains, and system design, activities at different scales will perform differently in terms of life cycle impact – in a non-linear way. This study addresses the issue of using the linear framework of LCA to study scalable and emerging technologies, by looking at different examples where technology scale up reflects non-linearly on the impact of a product. First, a computer simulation applied to an entire database is used to quantitatively estimate the effect of assuming activities in a product system are subject to improvements in efficiency. This provides a theoretical but indicative idea of how much uncertainty can be introduced by non-linear relationships between input values and results at the database level. Then the non-linear relations between the environmental burden per tkm of transport on one end, and the cargo mass and range autonomy on the other end is highlighted using a parametrized LCA model for heavy goods vehicles combined with learning scenarios that reflect different load factors and improvement in battery technology. Finally, a last example explores the case of activities related to the mining of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, an emerging technology, and how the impact of scaling the Bitcoin mining production is affected non-linearly by factors such as increase in mining efficiency and geographical distribution of miners. The paper concludes by discussing the relation between non-linearity and uncertainty and by providing recommendations for accounting for non-linearity in prospective LCA studies.