Global climate change resulting from the aggravating emissions of greenhouse gas (GHG) has aroused widespread international concern (Zhang & Zhang, 2022). Based on the climate report released by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2022, limiting global warming temperature below 1.5 ℃ requires that global GHG emissions should peak by 2025 and fall from 2010 levels by 43% by 2030, and necessitates carbon neutralization or climate neutrality or global net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 (IPCC, 2022). To achieve this global target, over 100 countries (e.g., South Africa, Germany, China, and Japan) have set carbon neutralization targets (Van Soest et al., 2021). Technological progress is considered an important factor to reduce carbon emissions (Jinqiao et al., 2022). The difficulty of low-carbon transformation is how to improve the contribution of technological progress to carbon peak and carbon neutralization and reduce the power generation cost of renewable energy through technological innovation. Therefore, developing clean energy technology is regarded as one of the most effective methods to respond to the concern of global climate change and achieve sustainability (Tao et al., 2022). Meanwhile, promoting the large-scale deployment of carbon mitigation technologies, such as carbon capture and storage (CCS) and negative emissions technologies (NETs), are also necessary (Fuhrman et al., 2020; Yang et al., 2020). However, the presently high costs make it difficult to apply these technologies on a large scale in various countries (Bellamy, 2018).
Promoting the large-scale development of renewable energy is the indispensable way to deal with increasingly severe environmental issues, achieve economic high-quality growth, and reach carbon peak and climate neutralization targets (Zhou et al., 2022). In the near future, the global economy will still be in the stage of medium and high-speed development, thus, the energy demand in various industries will continue to grow. The climate neutralization target urges all countries to look into zero-carbon alternatives to meet the expanding energy demands in the future (Elavarasan et al., 2020). The core of achieving sustainable development is to promote a win-win situation between high-quality economic growth and carbon emissions reduction (Zhang et al., 2021). However, the traditional economic growth pattern has led to the waste, destruction, depletion, and loss of natural resources, which has seriously shaken the foundation of national development (Wu et al., 2018). Therefore, it is critical to play the supporting role of science and technology in energy structure adjustment, so as to promote the gradual transformation of the economic growth model from factor-driven to innovation-driven.
The deterioration of natural resources has brought great challenges to high-quality economic development, economic security, and carbon neutralization targets. Thus, many countries have introduced the property right into natural resources management to tackle ecosystem services accounts (La Notte and Rhodes, 2020), making the concepts of natural capital or natural resources assets popular. Natural capital can be defined as natural assets which treat natural resources (e.g., energy, agriculture, and forestry) as economic inputs and environmental services, while natural resources assets refer to material assets that exist in the form of natural resources, which mainly include water resources asset, land resources assets, mineral resources assets, biological resources assets, ecological resources assets, and comprehensive resources assets. Both of them highlight the characteristics of property right of natural resources (Kurniawan et al., 2021; Ma et al., 2021). Natural resources accounting can help us avoid environmental disasters resulting from blind economic growth (Vardon et al., 2021). As such, natural resources assets are essential strategic tools to promote sustainable economic development, smooth economic fluctuation, and strength the construction of ecological civilization (Song et al., 2020).
Natural resource exploitation can foster produced capital accumulation, promoting a country’s sustainable development (Ouoba, 2020). Meanwhile, natural capital can also promote technological progress, improve people’s well-being and attract cross-regional inflows of talents, this externality of natural capital is the main reason for its positive influence on economic growth (Roseta-Palma et al., 2010). As an important channel for generating economic benefits from natural capital, the role of technological progress is particularly critical in the context of carbon peak and climate neutrality. In addition, renewable and nonrenewable natural capital are also extensively studied under the ground of sustainable development (Gasmi et al., 2020; Zhang et al., 2017). Renewable energy capital can positively impact the total wealth by decreasing the depletion rate of natural capital, increasing produced capital, and weakening the negative effect of energy consumption on human capital (Sugiawan and Managi, 2019). As such, increasing the effective use of renewable natural capital through technological progress can coordinate natural resource assets and high-quality economic development and provide a new path for achieving carbon neutrality goals.
The main objective of this special issue is to explore the role of technology in carbon peak and climate neutrality, and simultaneously explore the coordination role of technology in natural resource assets and economic growth and security. We invite scholars and practitioners to analyze how to ensure economic high-quality growth and economic security in climate neutrality.
Some potential topics are listed as follows:
- Changes in renewable energy development caused by decarbonization
- Energy development direction under the background of climate neutrality
- Changes in energy structure caused by low-carbon policies
- The role of different paths of technical progress towards climate neutrality
- Technological innovation and its impact on global climate change
- The carbon peak path at country and industry levels
- The driving effect of technical progress on carbon peak and carbon neutrality
- The impact of natural resources assets on technological progress
- Measurement of high-efficient use of natural resources
- Economic growth and security strategies in the context of climate neutrality
- Natural resources assets and its impact on economic growth and fluctuation
- Coordinated development of natural resource assets and economic growth
- Public policies on natural resources supply for securing economic growth
