Explore the vast range of titles available.

How has our relation to energy changed over time? What differences do particular energy sources make to human values, politics, and imagination? How have transitions from one energy source to another-from wood to coal, or from oil to solar to whatever comes next-transformed culture and society? What are the implications of uneven access to energy in the past, present, and future? Which concepts and theories clarify our relation to energy, and which just get in the way? Fueling Culture offers a compendium of keywords written by scholars and practitioners from around the world and across the humanities and social sciences. These keywords offer new ways of thinking about energy as both the source and the limit of how we inhabit culture, with the aim of opening up new ways of understanding the seemingly irresolvable contradictions of dependence upon unsustainable energy forms. Fueling Culture brings together writing that is risk-taking and interdisciplinary, drawing on insights from literary and cultural studies, environmental history and ecocriticism, political economy and political ecology, postcolonial and globalization studies, and materialisms old and new. Keywords in this volume include: Aboriginal, Accumulation, Addiction, Affect, America, Animal, Anthropocene, Architecture, Arctic, Automobile, Boom, Canada, Catastrophe, Change, Charcoal, China, Coal, Community, Corporation, Crisis, Dams, Demand, Detritus, Disaster, Ecology, Electricity, Embodiment, Ethics, Evolution, Exhaust, Fallout, Fiction, Fracking, Future, Gender, Green, Grids, Guilt, Identity, Image, Infrastructure, Innervation, Kerosene, Lebenskraft, Limits, Media, Metabolism, Middle East, Nature, Necessity, Networks, Nigeria, Nuclear, Petroviolence, Photography, Pipelines, Plastics, Renewable, Resilience, Risk, Roads, Rubber, Rural, Russia, Servers, Shame, Solar, Spill, Spiritual, Statistics, Surveillance, Sustainability, Tallow, Texas, Textiles, Utopia, Venezuela, Whaling, Wood, Work For a full list of keywords in and contributors to this volume, please go to: http://ow.ly/4mZZxV

Purpose Some future-oriented life cycle assessment (LCA) terms, particularly prospective and ex-ante, show notable increase in use in publications over the last decade. However, scholars have pointed out that it is currently unclear exactly what these terms mean and how they are related. This paper aims to explain defining differences between future-oriented LCA terms and provide terminology recommendations. Methods Existing definitions of future-oriented LCA terms were reviewed and analyzed. Workshops were held where defining differences of future-oriented LCA terms were discussed. Results Temporal positionality and technology maturity appear to be two critical aspects of future-oriented LCA. Prospective and ex-ante LCA are similar, with the possible difference that ex-ante LCA always involves an increase in technology maturity in the future. Considering the notable similarities, it seems reasonable to converge terms to mitigate field fragmentation and avoid terminology confusion. Conclusions To denote LCA studies with a future temporal positionality, we recommend using the term prospective LCA, defined as “LCA that models the product system at a future point in time relative to the time at which the study is conducted”. Furthermore, since technology maturity is clearly a critical aspect for prospective LCA, we recommend prospective LCA studies to clearly define the maturity of the technologies modeled in the production system.

Even if the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements is relatively well defined, some controversial terms are still in use. Indeed, the term “heavy metal” is a common term used for decades in the natural sciences, and even more in environmental sciences, particularly in studies of pollution impacts. As the use of the term appears to have increased, we highlight the relevance of the use of the term “Potentially Toxic Element(s)”, which needs more explicit endorsement, and we illustrate the chemical elements that need to be considered.

PurposeFuture scenarios and life cycle assessment (LCA) are powerful tools that can provide early sustainability assessments of novel products, technologies and systems. The combination of the two methods involves practical and conceptual challenges, but formal guidance and consensus on a rigorous approach are currently missing. This study provides a comprehensive overview of how different topic areas use future scenarios and LCA in order to identify useful methods and approaches, and to provide overall recommendations.MethodsThis study carried out a systematic literature review that involved searching for peer-reviewed articles on Web of Science, Scopus and Science Direct, utilising a rigorous set of keywords for future scenarios and for LCA. We identified 514 suitable peer-reviewed articles that were systematically analysed according to pre-defined sets of characteristics for the combined modelling of future scenarios and LCA.Results and discussionThe numbers of studies combining future scenarios and LCA increase every year and in all of the 15 topic areas identified. This combination is highly complex, due to different sequences in the modelling between future scenarios and LCA, the use of additional models and topic area-specific challenges. We identify and classify studies according to three archetypal modelling sequences: input, output and hybrid. More than 100 studies provide methods and approaches for combining future scenarios and LCA, but existing recommendations are specific to topic areas and for modelling sequences, and consensus is still missing. The efficacy of many studies is hampered by lack of quality. Only half of the articles complied with the LCA ISO standards, and only one quarter demonstrated consistent knowledge of future scenario theory. We observed inconsistent use of terminology and a considerable lack of clarity in the descriptions of methodological choices, assumptions and time frames.Conclusions and RecommendationsThe combined use of future scenarios and LCA requires formal guidance, in order to increase clarity and communicability. Guidance should provide unambiguous definitions, identify minimum quality requirements and produce mandatory descriptions of modelling choices. The goal and scope of future scenarios and LCA should be in accordance, and quality should be ensured both for the future scenarios and the LCA. In particular, future scenarios should always be developed contextually, to ensure effective assessment of the problem at hand. Guidance should also allow for maintaining current modelling complexity and topic area differences. We provide recommendations from the reference literature on terminology, future scenario development and the combined use of future scenarios and LCA that may already constitute preliminary guidance in the field. Information collected and recommendations provided will assist in a more balanced development of the combined use of future scenarios and LCA in view of the urgent challenges of sustainable development.

The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statement, published in 2009, was designed to help systematic reviewers transparently report why the review was done, what the authors did, and what they found. Over the past decade, advances in systematic review methodology and terminology have necessitated an update to the guideline. The PRISMA 2020 statement replaces the 2009 statement and includes new reporting guidance that reflects advances in methods to identify, select, appraise, and synthesise studies. The structure and presentation of the items have been modified to facilitate implementation. In this article, we present the PRISMA 2020 27-item checklist, an expanded checklist that details reporting recommendations for each item, the PRISMA 2020 abstract checklist, and the revised flow diagrams for original and updated reviews.

News organizations increasingly use the terms “climate emergency” and “climate crisis” to convey the urgency of climate change; yet, little is known about how this terminology affects news audiences. This study experimentally examined how using “climate emergency,” “climate crisis,” or “climate change” in Twitter-based news stories influences public engagement with climate change and news perceptions, as well as whether the effects depend on the focus of the news (i.e., on climate impacts, actions, or both impacts and actions) and on participants’ political ideology. Results showed no effect of terminology on climate change engagement; however, “climate emergency” reduced perceived news credibility and newsworthiness compared to “climate change.” Both climate engagement and news perceptions were more consistently affected by the focus of the stories: news about climate impacts increased fear, decreased efficacy beliefs and hope, and reduced news credibility compared to news about climate actions. No interactions with political ideology were found.

The plastics industry is proliferating continuously and the global plastics production in 2018 has reached around 360 million tones. This has further compounded the problem of waste plastics, which if not appropriately disposed cause serious environmental problems like land pollution, marine pollution and water source pollution. As an alternative, there has been a paradigm shift from substituting synthetic plastics i.e. fossil-based to bioplastics. However, the world of bioplastics is riddled with many problems as the current terminology used around such bioplastics is confusing and general public is not provided with reliable information about the true biodegradability/compostability of the products. As a result, \"greenwashing\" is on the rise, with brands even making spurious claims about the environmental benefits of their products. This review article scans the world of biodegradable/bioplastics, major players and production capacities, their current status with respect to production and application. The commercial biopolymers available in the market and their technology have been also discussed in detail. The article also reviews various technologies like enzyme-based technology and oxo-degradable technology being propagated as a tool to convert conventional plastics like PE/PP/PET etc. to a biodegradable plastic. Further, various issues with oxo-based technology and enzyme-based technology have been compiled. Besides, various standards, test methods (ASTM/ISO) related to testing, specifications of biodegradable plastics, their scope/limitations and potential misuse have been covered. Further, the review article discusses the limitation of the various standards and why changes in the standards are required. The article tries to focus on various myths & realities of biodegradable/bioplastics and the challenges and expectations of the real world.

An international joint task group co-led by the International Network of Agencies for Health Technology Assessment (INAHTA) and Health Technology Assessment International (HTAi) has developed a new and internationally accepted definition of HTA. The task group, consisting of representatives of leading HTA networks, societies and global organizations, developed guiding principles for the process and followed an established consultation plan with the broader HTA community to develop the definition. The consensus achieved by the international joint task group brings the collective weight of the participating networks, societies, and organizations behind the new definition. The new definition of HTA is an historic achievement and it is offered to the current and emerging HTA world as a cornerstone reference for today and into the future.

The scoping review has become increasingly popular as a form of knowledge synthesis. However, a lack of consensus on scoping review terminology, definition, methodology, and reporting limits the potential of this form of synthesis. In this article, we propose recommendations to further advance the field of scoping review methodology. We summarize current understanding of scoping review publication rates, terms, definitions, and methods. We propose three recommendations for clarity in term, definition and methodology. We recommend adopting the terms “scoping review” or “scoping study” and the use of a proposed definition. Until such time as further guidance is developed, we recommend the use of the methodological steps outlined in the Arksey and O'Malley framework and further enhanced by Levac et al. The development of reporting guidance for the conduct and reporting of scoping reviews is underway. Consistency in the proposed domains and methodologies of scoping reviews, along with the development of reporting guidance, will facilitate methodological advancement, reduce confusion, facilitate collaboration and improve knowledge translation of scoping review findings.