随着全球气候变化问题日益严重，能源和交通贫困政策成为各国政府关注的焦点。近期，一项发表在《能源与气候变化》杂志上的一项研究，通过焦点小组调查了英国公众对具有能源和交通贫困影响的政策的支持情况。 该研究发现，公众和专家利益相关者对能源和交通贫困政策的选择存在一致和差异。一致的意见包括要求房东改进能源效率、扩大温暖家园折扣和确保新房屋符合75%的二氧化碳排放标准。而差异的意见则涉及智能电表和飞机使用更可持续燃料等问题。 研究指出，公众支持政策的主要原因是他们认为自己可能需要政府的帮助，而政府则需要关注社会福利政策，以确保能源和交通贫困政策的实施。这些研究结果对于制定和实施具有能源和交通贫困影响的政策具有重要意义。 然而，研究同时指出，当前政策在减少碳排放和保障社会福利方面尚缺乏整体协同。在此基础上，研究人员建议，政府在制定相关政策时应更加关注公众的实际需求，以提高政策的接受度和有效性。 此外，该研究还发现，公众对能源和交通贫困政策的态度受到自身利益和政策理解程度的影响。因此，政府在宣传和推广相关政策时，应加强公众教育和信息传递，以提高公众的政策认知和支持度。 总之，这项研究为英国政府制定和实施能源和交通贫困政策提供了重要的参考依据，同时对其他国家也具有一定的借鉴意义。
Global energy use has grown with the advance of human civilization such that we now use approximately 175,000 TWh of energy per year. This demand for energy provides essential services, from lighting homes to producing heat for industrial processes. Human demand for energy in the coming decades is highly uncertain. Climate change, the consequent necessity for decarbonization, and the many possible technology and policy pathways to net zero emissions (or not) mean there are many possible futures for energy demand. Regardless of this uncertainty, change in the energy sector is happening already, with greater change to come. In this article we discuss fuels and energy carriers, energy sectors and end uses, emerging energy vectors and new technologies, and lastly the cross linking of energy sectors and vectors.
抗菌素耐药性(AMR)是一项全球战略优先事项，位于英国政府的国家风险登记册中。到2050年，AMR预计将导致1000万人死亡，超过癌症。仅在2019年，估计就有495万人死于细菌AMR。尽管全球药物研发(R&D)支出持续逐年增加，但抗菌药物发现的研究目前并不是一个有吸引力的商业投资。这造成了两个主要后果：用于该领域研发的人力资本持续下降，以及从长远来看，治疗有效的抗生素和其他抗菌剂的可获得性下降。需要作出协调一致的努力，将高级别政策承诺转化为战略行动，以便为新的抗菌剂的研发提供长期资金和支持。
在英国页岩气争议期间，提供能源基础设施与赋予公众和当地社区决策发言权之间出现的紧张关系，为任何重新发展国内页岩气产业的尝试以及英国的前景提供了许多重要的教训。实现净零排放所需的基础设施。萨塞克斯大学的研究人员调查了英国页岩气决策中的正式公众参与情况，以了解所提供的参与机会的性质和程度，并了解参与者对这些活动的看法。本政策简报总结了这项工作的结果，并向监督能源基础设施正式参与进程的机构提出了四项建议。
Construction product platforms provide the opportunity to improve productivity in construction projects while maintaining heterogeneity of output. The growing literature on construction product platforms describes how product suppliers develop product platforms either top-down or bottom-up, independently from project delivery. Through a single case study of a consultancy firm, this paper shows how a specialist consultancy firm operating in the construction sector developed their own product platform on projects while iteratively developing and augmenting their delivery capabilities. Distinguishing between activity integration, coordination, and consolidation, the platform development process highlights how vertical and horizontal consolidation of capabilities within the engineering phase of delivery enables early resolution of both product and process specifications. This means that vertical coordination between engineering and manufacturing phases can be managed by a fully specified contract, rather than acquisition. The analysis of the case shows how construction can be more closely aligned with the linear and sequential models found in manufacturing through clarifying and distinguishing the roles of engineering, manufacturing, finishing and sub-assembly.
This paper aims to situate power in ‘niche innovations’ through an investigation of cycling inequalities in the city of Birmingham. Much research has focused on the sustainability and innovation potential of cycling. However, debates usually revolve around the power relations between cycling and the dominant automobility regime, thus ignoring the possible inequalities embedded within niches. This paper aims to contribute to such analyses by unfolding the multiple inequalities and relations of exclusion that can be embedded in the practice of cycling. Drawing on Mobilities research for the EPSRC Liveable Cities programme, it focuses on the car-dependent city of Birmingham, in order to explore cycling as a practice with various socio-material, infrastructural, political and economic entanglements that can embed, reproduce or generate new socio-spatial inequalities, processes of gentrification and immobilities. Through such analysis, this paper aims to situate power in examining niche innovations. However, it also aims to underline that understanding and addressing such inequalities are central for not only locating cycling in the centre of developing a more sustainable mobility future, but also enabling a more sustainable future for cycling itself.
We use The Patents (Amendment) Act, 2002 in India as a quasi-natural experiment to identify the causal effect of higher incentives for innovation on a firm’s compensation structure. We find that stronger intellectual property (IP) protection has a sharper impact on the demand for managerial skill for technologically advanced firms. Firms that were a-priori above the industry median (in terms of technology adoption, more so for R&D expenditure) witness a rise in the share of managerial compensation by 1.3%–8.3% higher than the rest. This effect is completely driven by firms between 5–8th decile with no effect on firms below the median or at the very top of the technological ladder. This observed “snail-shape” in the firms’ response to the IP shock is rationalized in a model where firms within an industry compete for patents by investing in managerial inputs. The observed increase in wage inequality can partly be attributed to a stronger performance pay for high-tech firms. Associatedly, high-tech firms invested more in technology adoption, started to produce more product varieties at higher quality, and filed for more product patent claims.
This paper aims at revisiting the empirical evidence on the recent trends of countries’ integration in global value chains (GVCs) in Europe. It investigates two potential sources of unbalances that these processes might relate to (i) the sectoral specialization of the patterns of international fragmentation, whether high-technology manufacturing or knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS), and (ii) the occupational categories that have benefited or been penalized by these trends. A rich empirical mapping of these trends in the European countries is provided, based on World Input–Output Database and European Union Labour Force Survey (EU LFS) data. The results on the overall and sectoral-specific trends of integration in GVCs and the associated changes in the shares of managers and manual workers show dual-speed and qualitatively different integration patterns in Europe, with Eastern European (EE) countries rapidly integrating in high-tech manufacturing and the core of Western countries strengthening their mutual integration in the KIBS area. Despite the relatively “good quality” integration of EE countries, the evidence does not seem to reveal a mirroring upgrading of employment structures. While this empirical contribution does not attempt to identify causal relationships, the picture provided in the paper shows that, overall, integration in GVCs seems to reproduce and perhaps exacerbate the initial asymmetries in the sectoral and employment structure, with employment shares of manual workers reducing on the whole and knowledge-intensive occupations concentrating in Western Europe.
Governments must focus on solutions that are already working, even when they aren’t glamorous or supported by powerful lobbyists.
