Improving Public Attitude towards Renewable Energy

In recent years, the urgent necessity and tremendous opportunity to accelerate the transition to a low-carbon competitive economy has resulted in growth of long-term targets for renewable energy and energy efficiency, which are coming from policy bodies worldwide. The inherent distributed nature of renewable energies, together with the modularity of those technologies, brings opportunities for consumer empowerment in terms of participation. Nevertheless, there is still the need for increasing global awareness and enabling policies, to strengthen the citizen role in the energy system, facilitating their proactive participation as renewable energy purchasers, investors, and clean energy producers. Drawing from research interviews and the academic literature, this article conceptualizes the understanding of the need for improving public attitudes and explores the factors influencing the acceptance in terms of misconceptions, best communication practices, activities addressing public concerns, and potential actions to bolster public support towards renewable energy. Research interviews were conducted at a technical workshop on social acceptance of renewable energy, held in Abu Dhabi in October 2013, and the findings show that despite detecting an increasing trend towards greater and more active participation of citizens, many misconceptions together with insufficient and inefficient awareness and communication initiatives on renewable energies persist. The main conclusions can be used as a basis for formulating sustainable energy ommunication and awareness campaigns in order to enhance public acceptance and increase active participation in renewable energy technologies.The authors would like to acknowledge the IRENA Secretariat and all of the experts who participated in the international technical workshop, and Stefan Ferris for his support in drafting. The authors would like to thank the Catalan Government for the quality accreditation 1537 given to their research group GREA (2017 SGR 1537). GREiA is certified agent TECNIO in the category of technology developers from the Government of Catalonia

Performance measure of eco-process innovation: insights from a literature review

Eco-process innovation has been recognised as one of the important strategies for mitigating the growing environmental challenges. Its concept has succeeded in drawing the interests of many scholars worldwide. The aim of this paper is to review the literature to clarify how one actually measure eco-process innovation performance. Critical analysis of literature has been performed in this study. Database searches were mainly relied to compile the literature. In relation to eco-process innovation assessment, results revealed that most prior works focused on the economic and environmental performance with the exclusion of social performance and very limited attempts done in analysing real operational data. It was identified that there is a need for empirical investigations on measuring the social performance of eco-process innovation along with the economic and environmental performance, and on development of operational measuring instrument as these study area have not been well explored