Community Energy Literature Review

Three different approaches to the impacts of climate change are briefly described in this post. The first focussed on public views about five climate issues of wide interest in the UK. The second presented to a UK audience the views of a panel of experts on a wider range of climate issues, with the aim of stimulating interest and action. The third concentrated on the ways in which the benefits from climate mitigation tend to be overlooked in the European context, and how this might be remedied. Citizens’ Panel A recent publication by the Climate Change Committee (CCC) described the work of a Citizens’ Panel on climate adaptation in the UK. The aim of the project was to understand public views on the subject, and so to guide the CCC’s future advice to the UK Government (CCC, 2026). There were two key questions: “Which of the impacts of climate change are you most concerned about and why?” and “What do you think should be done to adapt to these impacts?” The panel worked on five aspe...

This post will draw on three papers published this year which are all concerned with the role of locally based energy projects in the transition towards net zero. The first discusses the situation in the UK; the second addresses the wider European picture; and the third concentrates on community energy in Portugal. Each paper covers a range of issues, but here the focus will be on the importance of community engagement and how to promote and evaluate it. UK energy projects Gupta, Zahiri and Gregg (2026) consider three kinds of project in the UK: community energy, local energy, and smart local energy systems; their study suggests ways in which the effectiveness of such projects can be improved. The differences between projects described by the terms community energy, local energy, and smart local energy systems can be loosely summed up as follows. Community energy projects are typically owned and controlled by members of a local community and aim to benefit the community. They oft...

  State of climate action 2025 is the title of a research report by the World Resources Institute (WRI), and is the subject of an article by the C40 Knowledge Hub. Here the report is described as setting out how to close “the global gap in climate action” so as to keep the Paris Agreement goals within reach. It “grades collective efforts … across key sectors” and finds that in each sector climate action has not been adequate to “achieve the Paris Agreement’s temperature goal.” Forty-five indicators are assessed in the report and none are on track to meet their targets by the end of this decade. The report sets “actionable targets for 2030, 2035 and 2050 across the world’s highest-emitting sectors  – power, buildings, industry, transport, forests and land, and food and agriculture” and assesses recent progress and the rates of progress needed for the future. A few examples of the targets are: to phase out coal at least ten times faster than at present; to reduce deforestation ...

An unnamed historian living in the Second People's Republic of China in 2399 seeks to understand why the advanced industrial societies failed to prevent catastrophic climate change, despite having both adequate scientific knowledge and the technical means to avert the crisis. The historian draws on records from the time of the Industrial Revolution onwards, and describes the growing awareness of climate change in the late twentieth century, the extreme weather events of the early twenty-first century, the subsequent disintegration of the Western Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets and the following events which came to be called the Great Collapse. Two ideologies had gripped the western world and stopped it from taking the action needed to prevent its downfall. The historian is the fictitious narrator of The Collapse of Western Civilisation (Oreskes and Conway, 2014) and the inhibiting ideologies are positivism and market fundamentalism. For the benefit of readers unfamiliar with...

In January the House of Commons Library published an update on the UK economy which noted its recent slow growth and that the government “has repeatedly said that  growth is its number one, or defining, mission ”. It went on to describe some of the plans proposed by Chancellor Rachel Reeves to achieve growth. These included plans to improve infrastructure; deregulation and simplification of environmental protection rules to remove barriers to growth; and measures intended to boost investment from UK businesses and from abroad (Harari, 2025). In February an online article from Politico reported on the attitude of the Conservative opposition led by Kemi Badenoch to the UK’s net zero target, which was signed into law by former Prime Minister Theresa May in June 2019. While “Badenoch insists she wants to tackle climate change” she and her team “say the target damages the country” and want to abandon it. The Shadow Energy Secretary Andrew Bowie is reported to have said that the 2050 t...

Jens Beckert is director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany, and his book How We Sold Our Future: The Failure to Fight Climate Change was published in German in 2024, followed by an English translation (Beckert, 2025). A review on Earth.Org described the book as “a sober, rational assessment of what influences have impacted the world’s failure to address climate change, and what this means for our shared future”. Beckert asks “what are the social, political, and economic drivers and structures that brought us to this point?” and “examines each of the social and political structures responsible for and affected by the situation” (Lee, 2025). Beckert’s book is of modest length, with nine chapters: Knowledge without change, Capitalist modernity, Big Oil, The hesitant state, Global prosperity, Consumption without limits, Green growth, Planetary boundaries, and What next? The book provides extensive notes and references. The chapter titles give an...

The Summit of the Future is a United Nations event planned for New York in September. “ At the Summit , countries are expected to adopt a Pact for the Future that covers five areas: sustainable development and related financing; international peace and security; science, technology, innovation and digital cooperation; youth and future generations; and transforming global governance” (UN news, 2023). According to Pham (2024) the summit is “intended to revive a multilateral system built for a different era”. She claims that “no other platform for reforming global governance can compete with a summit that convenes all countries, great and small.” Pham described the initial draft of the Pact for the Future as “a timid text” characterised by reaffirmations rather than decisions and stressed the need for it to “look ahead to the governance of new and emerging global challenges”. However, she regards a proposed Declaration on Future Generations as an inspired idea. The Declaration “would...