Recent advances in carbon emissions reduction: policies, technologies, monitoring, assessment and modeling

Climate change and its social, environmental, economic and ethical consequences are widely recognized as the major set of interconnected problems facing human societies. Its impacts and costs will be large, serious, and unevenly spread, globally for decades. The main factor causing climate change and global warming is the increase of global carbon emissions produced by human activities such as deforestation and burning of fossil fuels. In this special volume, the articles mainly focus on investigations of technical innovations and policy interventions for improved energy efficiency and carbon emissions reduction in a wide diversity of industrial, construction and agricultural sectors at different scales, from the smallest scales (firm or household), cities, regional, to national and global scales. Some articles in this special volume assess alternative carbon emissions reduction approaches, such as carbon capture and storage and geoengineering schemes. Given the high cost and internal/external uncertainties of carbon capture and storage and risks and side effects of various geoengineering schemes, improved energy efficiency and widespread implementation of low fossil-carbon renewable-energy based systems are clearly the most direct and effective approaches to reduce carbon emissions. This means that we have to radically transform our societal metabolism towards low/no fossil-carbon economies. However, design and implementation of low/no fossil-carbon production will require fundamental changes in the design, production and use of products and these needed changes are evolving but much more needs to be done. Additionally, the design and timing of suitable climate policy interventions, such as various carbon taxation/trading schemes, must be integral in facilitating the development of low fossil carbon products and accelerating the transition to post-fossil carbon societies.