Local perspectives can conflict with national and international climate targets. This study explores three stakeholder (community, provincial, and federal) perspectives on the Alberta oil sands as risks for a sustainability transition in Canada. In an ex-post analysis, we compared outputs from stakeholder consultations and energy-economy models. Our research shows that different local stakeholders groups disregarded some policy risks for the Alberta oil sands and Canadian energy transition. These stakeholders expected the sector to grow, despite increasing environmental penalties and external market pressures. The study revealed that blind-spots on risks, or “risk blindness”, increased as stakeholders became less certain about policy climate goals. We argue that “risk blindness” could be amplified by dominant institutional narratives that contradict scientific research and international climate policy. Strategies that integrate local narratives, considered as marginalized, provide perspectives beyond emission reductions and are essential for meeting climate targets while supporting a just transition.

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Identifying the risks that could impact a low-carbon transition is a prerequisite to assessing and managing these risks. We systematically characterise risks associated with decarbonisation pathways in fifteen case studies conducted in twelve countries around the world. We find that stakeholders from business, government, NGOs, and others supplied some 40 % of these risk inputs, significantly widening the scope of risks considered by academics and experts. Overall, experts and academics consider more economic risks and assess these with quantitative methods and models, while other stakeholders consider political risks more. To avoid losing sight of risks that cannot be easily quantified and modelled, including some economic risks, impact assessment modelling should be complemented with qualitative research and active stakeholder engagement. A systematic risk elicitation facilitates communication with stakeholders, enables better risk mitigation, and increases the chance of a sustainable transition.

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There is a large literature suggesting that improvements in energy efficiency support efforts at climate mitigation. Addressing a conceptual gap in that literature, however, we evaluate whether there are any conditions under which policies to promote improvements in energy efficiency could be counterproductive to efforts to limit climate change to 1.5 °C global warming from pre-industrial times. We identify three conditions under which this could be the case. The first condition is if policies for energy efficiency have a political opportunity cost, in terms of crowding out or delaying policies aimed at decarbonizing energy supply. There is an extensive literature in the fields of political science and policy studies to suggest that this is possible, but there have been no studies examining whether it has actually happened or is likely to happen in the future. The second condition is if investments in energy efficiency improvements come at a higher cost, per unit of fossil energy avoided, than do investments in new renewable energy supply. Current cost estimates suggest that there are some energy efficiency investments for which this is the case, but it is difficult to predict whether this will remain the case in the future. The third condition is if policies for energy efficiency, or specific investments in energy efficiency, were to delay the complete decarbonization of energy supply by more than some critical value. We show that critical delay is quite short—measured in weeks to months—in the case of a 1.5 °C temperature target, assuming constrained availability of negative emission technologies. It is impossible to say whether any of these conditions is likely, but in theory, each of them would appear to be possible.@en

This paper introduces a method to analyse and explore consistency within policy mixes in order to support the policymaking cycle and applies it to energy and climate change policies in the United Kingdom (UK) biofuels policy context. The first part of the paper introduces a multi-level method to evaluate consistency within policy mixes implemented over a period of time. The first level explores consistency across policy design features in policy mixes. The second level evaluates how stakeholders, and their interactions with policy instruments and each other, can impact consistency within a given context. These interactions influence the implementation of policies and can lead to unintended outcomes that fail to meet the overarching goals. In the second part of the paper, we apply our method to the UK biofuels policy mix, to explore a sector that cuts across the policy areas of transportation, energy, land-use, air, and climate change. Our analysis demonstrates how, by overlooking complex interactions in the design and implementation of policies in the biofuels sector, policy mixes have conflicted with the development of a potential low-carbon technology.@en