Recent research directions: missing pieces of the puzzle
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EDITORIAL
Recent research directions: missing pieces of the puzzle Petar Sabev Varbanov1 Published online: 18 November 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
The current COVID-19 pandemic has brought about sharp changes in society, mainly following from the mitigation measures of compulsory mask-wearing, social distancing and “home office” work. A notable dip in the world energy demand (Plumer and Popovich 2020) was observed with the introduction of the lockdown measures, but the demands rapidly increased to the previous levels once the measures were relaxed in the summer. People have seen and felt the benefit of the potentially clean cities during the periods of low activity. However, the core patterns of production and consumption are still the same and will keep causing the same environmental and health issues as before. The growing energy demands are directly and indirectly connected to various environmental impacts—climate change, water scarcity, toxicity, haze, to name a few. Starting from our previous analysis of the energy supply and losses (Varbanov et al. 2018), a more recent editorial (Varbanov 2020) stressed the disparity between emissions and economic cost of global supply chains. While the immediate actions stemming from that realisation would be to evaluate and optimise the supply chains for reducing the footprints, the issue is non-trivial. It requires sufficient data and analysis pointing to the necessary policy, managerial and technological improvements. Finding the right combination of measures ties a knot of several disciplines, which have been put at the heart of this journal—the technologies and the policies to steer the world societies towards a better quality of life in a sustainable way. An analysis of the most cited articles published by Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy for the period 2019–2020 has been performed, using Scopus, mapping them to topical groups. The list was sorted by the number of citations in descending order. Articles with less than * Petar Sabev Varbanov [email protected] 1
Sustainable Process Integration Laboratory‑SPILNETME Centre, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Brno University of Technology-VUT Brno, Technická 2896/2, 61669 Brno, Czech Republic
three citations were excluded. In the resulting list, the most researched and popular with the readers are papers related to policy issues, end-of-pipe treatment, energy supply, and analyses of waste reuse. To be more specific, the three most cited articles are: • A review on biochar management (Maroušek et al.
2019)—discussing soil vs. energy value use of biochar which attracted 89 citations. • An econometric-environmental review and meta-analysis of Gross Domestic Product, energy consumption, use of renewables and CO2 emissions (Kahia et al. 2019), cited 27 times. • A technology investigation of lignocellulosic material pretreatment for ethanol production, featuring economic and emission evaluation (Gurgel da Silva et al. 2019), cited 24 times. The other list entries treat
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