Recent research directions: missing pieces of the puzzle

Excerpt

The current COVID-19 pandemic has brought about sharp changes in society, mainly following from the mitigation measures of compulsory mask-wearing, social distancing and “home office” work. A notable dip in the world energy demand (Plumer and Popovich 2020) was observed with the introduction of the lockdown measures, but the demands rapidly increased to the previous levels once the measures were relaxed in the summer. People have seen and felt the benefit of the potentially clean cities during the periods of low activity. However, the core patterns of production and consumption are still the same and will keep causing the same environmental and health issues as before. The growing energy demands are directly and indirectly connected to various environmental impacts—climate change, water scarcity, toxicity, haze, to name a few. …