Social dimensions of energy system change in a disrupted world

As Australia, New Zealand, and much of the world live under home isolation to contain the spread of COVID-19, attention is turning to short term environmental responses to the sudden changes in human behaviour, and implications for global dealings with the climate emergency. Reductions in energy usage are among the changes already apparent. Air and road transportation has reduced drastically, so cities no longer have their usual traffic jams (Knight 2020). Photographs of clear skies over Beijing, Kathmandu and many other cities offer visual reminder of the benefits of sudden declines in air pollution. Press and magazine commentaries also speculate whether people’s lifestyles will change towards living more simply, as people experience living with less, shopping locally, cooking at home, new levels of neighbourly support, and much more time with immediate family. There is further anticipation of structural changes, with discussion of a proportion of employers and workers maintaining much more working from home than in the past, as advantages are experienced (Ross 2020). Thus the enforced social changes required to contend with the pandemic may well offer an opportunity for redirection of national economies and lifestyles and with them energy usage and opportunities to address climate change, in recovery (Rosenbloom and Markard 2020). Meanwhile, governments are listening to experts – and putting them in the forefront of public announcements – to an unprecedented degree. Optimists hope this will make a precedent for heeding climate scientists in addressing the climate emergency (Farhart 2020).

Changes in energy usage, and sources, are already being measured. The International Energy Agency (2020) has analysed recent daily data from 30 countries representing over two-thirds of global energy demand. It calculates that countries in full lockdown are experiencing an average 25 per cent decline in energy demand per week and those in partial lockdown an average 18 per cent decline. Global CO2 emissions are expected to decrease by eight per cent over 2020. During the ‘lockdown’ period renewable energy has experienced growth in demand, while coal and oil have experienced sharp drops (IEA 2020).

Energy futures are very much part of debates associated with the massive world changes arising from COVID-19. Experts including Australia’s former Liberal Party Leader and Shadow Treasurer Prof. Hewson has argued ‘there is every reason to expect that the virus crisis will strengthen and accelerate the imperative to transition to a low-carbon world by mid-century’ (Hewson 2020). The Australian Prime Minister, however, has been mentioning coal amongst economic strategies, and activists fear reduced parliamentary function in Australia in 2020 will limit scrutiny.

This issue focuses on a special collection on wind energy, guest edited by Rebecca Colvin and Ian Boothroyd, two articles on organisational change and the electricity sector, and two articles on information for environmental monitoring, both focused on water and catchments.

Decarbonising the energy sector

In times of global upheaval and change, like the present, public attention is quickly occupied by the immediate, pressing issues of the day. Downs (1972) outlined this in the Issue-Attention Cycle, and the pattern holds now in the early twenty-first Century. But, COVID-19 lands on top of, and in addition to, the extant issues with which we – as a global society and community of researchers and practitioners – have long been grappling. Our climate is continuing to warm, and the need for socially acceptable and equitable solutions to decarbonisation remain critical; perhaps even more critical now, following the social and economic disruptions wrought by the global pandemic.

Following decades of inadequate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, today’s exigencies of climate change demand widespread social and systems change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report on the impacts of 1.5 degrees of warming (IPCC 2018, A3.3) drew this into sharp focus, stating that ‘Future climate-related risks would be reduced by the upscaling and acceleration of far-reaching, multi-level and cross-sectoral climate mitigation and by both incremental and transformational adaptation’.

Despite the widespread implications of climate change for society, mitigation efforts have prominently focused on decarbonisation of the electricity sector. Compared to other sectors such as agriculture and transport, the electricity sector has perhaps one of the simplest technological pathways for addressing climate change: substituting electrons generated by the burning of fossil fuels with electrons generated by renewable, or at least low-emissions, sources. It should come as no surprise, then, that understanding and managing the material and social changes associated with decarbonisation of the electricity sector is a key focus for environmental scholars and practitioners in Australia and New Zealand.

One of the curious features of the social dimension of decarbonisation of the electricity sector has been the coincidence of strong, in-principle support for renewable energy development (e.g. Hobman and Ashworth 2013) with localised and often intense opposition to specific projects (e.g. Botterill and Cockfield 2016; Colvin, Witt, and Lacey 2016; Hall and Jeanneret 2015; Hindmarsh 2010). This disjoint emphasises the importance of engaging with the social context in which the material experience of energy change for decarbonisation occurs. Social opposition to energy change is often framed as a ‘problem’ to be overcome. However, this is a highly technocratic approach, which assumes the supremacy of top-down decision-making, and implicitly positions engagements with communities, stakeholders, or publics more broadly as transactions aimed at securing community support. Instead, exploring the drivers of social opposition may be viewed as a means to better understand the multifaceted and often competing expectations people hold for the management of energy change.

The study of social responses to renewable energy development, via cases of both social harmony and conflict, leads us to consider fairness as critical to social responses to energy change. We can understand fairness in energy across three broad domains: distributive fairness, pertaining to the distribution of burdens and benefits of energy change; procedural fairness, which is associated with the nature of decision-making process, and; interactional fairness, considering whether interpersonal and intergroup engagements are characterised by mutual respect and dignity (Gross 2007, 2014). The focus on fairness de-emphasises the material nature of energy change (e.g. the appearance and positioning of infrastructure) and instead centres interest on the social experience of processes of energy change. Energy change can, therefore, be understood not solely as a technical challenge leading to a material change in the energy system. It is also a process of social change, involving negotiation between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’, acknowledging and rebalancing power asymmetries, and necessitating exploration of and experimentation in processes for decision-making.

It is, therefore, a pleasure to introduce a special collection of articles in this issue of the Australasian Journal of Environmental Management that explores this social dimension of energy system change.

Wind energy

Wind energy promises distributed, renewable energy; a welcome addition to efforts toward decarbonisation. However, expansion of the wind energy sector has proven controversial, with contestation at local-community and national-political scales. By unpacking the social dimension of wind energy development we can learn not just about good practices and social expectations for this sector, but also about social change more generally. And, more specifically, we can learn how to grapple with social and technological change in a high-stakes, politically polarised setting.

Nina Hall, Jarra Hicks, Taryn Lane and Emily Wood examine Australian wind energy developers’ community engagement plans. Through this analysis, they articulate wind companies’ desires for company-community relations and the influence of industry good practice guidelines and public policy. Critically, Hall and colleagues find that wind energy developers, by and large, seek to exceed community expectations in the nature of their engagement and project design and implementation. Benefit-sharing, involving financial or other transfers usually to the geographically-local community, is a central theme in their analysis, and is identified as a key element of socially responsible practice and being a ‘good neighbour’.

The second article on wind, by Hicks, interrogates the business models of the two community-owned wind energy projects in Australia. Hicks provides welcome nuance towards the way community ownership is understood in contrast to the traditional corporate developer approach. Through examining Hepburn Wind (Victoria) and Denmark Community Windfarm (Western Australia), Hicks outlines important distinctions in the depth of community involvement, the nature of economic arrangements, and governance structure. The configuration of these aspects of community-owned wind energy projects leads to differences in social outcomes and points to the significance of social participation and empowerment in maximising benefits. Hicks’ analysis shows that ‘community-owned’ is not a singular category, and that lessons for good engagement, outlined by Hall et al. in this issue, are likewise instructive for community-owned projects.

Taken together, the research by Hall and colleagues and Hicks offer a valuable insight into the social dimension of energy change. Their analyses across both traditional corporate and community-owned models of wind energy development steer us towards recognising the importance of fairness: procedural, distributional, and interactional.

Organisational change and the electricity sector

Accompanying the articles on wind energy are two articles that consider organisational change in response to climate change, with a focus on the electricity sector. Belinda Wade and Andrew Griffiths examine best practice carbon management, contrasting experiences in the high-emissions electricity sector with the (comparatively) low-emissions university sector. Again emphasising nuance and contextualisation, Wade and Griffiths find that all the organisations studied are progressing with carbon management practices, but struggling to approach decarbonisation. Usefully, they present a typology of organisational decarbonisation strategies that considers the emissions intensity of the organisation and the level of progress toward decarbonisation.

Kirti Mishra, Cristina Neesham, Ken Coghill and Wendy Stubbs then examine the flipside of climate action: climate inaction. Through analysis of the electricity sector, Mishra and colleagues consider frameworks of social-ecological system resilience to characterise impediments to climate change action. The analysis shows that transformation from a fossil fuels regime to a renewable energy regime is limited by scarcity and rigidity traps, which operate across scales from organisational through to governmental. Through applying insights from resilience to the electricity sector, Mishra et al. identify opportunities for overcoming the traps through a focus on competencies, resources, and cultural changes. This requires a commitment to integrative and interdisciplinary research and practice.

Information and monitoring for decision-making

Our two remaining articles highlight information and monitoring in environmental stewardship in water and catchment contexts. Patrick Bonney, Angela Murphy, Birgita Hansen and Claudia Baldwin focus on the community initiative represented in citizen science, and its opportunities to provide information towards catchment decision-making and foster linkages between communities and governments. Their study of two citizen science programs, and 47 program coordinators across Australia, suggests that primary emphasis is placed on capacity building, whereas opportunities to contribute to government monitoring and community engagement are only partially fulfilled. Although a majority of such programs intend to inform catchment decision-making, data were used in less than half of the programs. The authors suggest that linkages between citizen science and catchment decision-making could be improved by increasing institutional support, improving coordination and embracing new possibilities for collaboration, and demonstrating and communicating program achievements.

Turning to conceptual frameworks underpinning effective monitoring, Peter Negus, Joanna Blessing, Sara Clifford and Jonathan Marshall investigate managers’ needs for information that helps them to address priority threats. They offer an adaptive monitoring framework designed to overcome typical limitations in diagnostic capacity, operational resources, explicit monitoring objectives and rigorous sampling designs. Their conceptual model is intended to reveal the interactions among the threats to ecosystem condition, that may produce multiplicative consequences for ecosystem structure and function. As stressors change, managers can target their actions to the priority issues, and change these as required.

Announcements

We are pleased to announce that Benjamin Allen has joined our group of Associate Editors. Ben was a guest editor (with others) for a special issue on ‘Wildlife conservation management on inhabited islands’ in 2018, provided this year’s cover photo, and is a regular reviewer. He is a wildlife biology, ecology, conservation and management expert. His interests include solutions for human-wildlife conflict, development and delivery of community wildlife management planning and training programs, community engagement, consultation and co-innovation, wildlife abundance surveys and population monitoring, design and implementation of practical wildlife survey methodologies, and wildlife capture and handling.

Editors tip

How much detail should you provide about your methods? Here journals, and their reviewers, can have somewhat different expectations. The level of detail should be sufficient to allow readers to judge whether your methodology is appropriate to the topic and robust. It should allow subsequent researchers wishing to replicate your study to do so. Please follow a conventional format in reporting your methods. After naming your overall approach, e.g. survey, case studies, explain your sampling, instruments (if any), procedure, and methods of analysis. The level of detail on each should be roughly equivalent. It is irritating to reviewers, editors, then readers, to have to hunt back and forth in a methods section to find out what was done, why and how.

Acknowledgement

We thank Ian Boothroyd for his contributions to compiling the collection of articles on wind energy.