EES: Addressing Challenges in Energy, Environmental Science

The Royal Society of Chemistry published its first issue of Energy & Environmental Science (EES) in 2008 with the ambition to become home for exceptional, insightful research into sustainable energy conversion and storage and associated global environmental impacts.

Since its launch, EES has gone from strength to strength with high growth in submissions and citations while also providing a highly visible forum for research globally. The journal's metrics have, for a long time, placed it among the top of Q1 (Energy & Fuels) and Q1 (Environmental Sciences) for Best Impact Factor Quartile (Journal Citation Reports？, Clarivate).

Interdisciplinary convergence breaks research boundaries

EES's scope is intentionally broad, covering all aspects of energy conversion and storage, alternative fuel technologies and the science of environmental impacts that are related to energy technologies, such as global atmospheric science, climate change and carbon capture. A further aim was to bridge traditional subject boundaries and encourage different communities to work together on important problems.

EES has been supported by world-class scientists serving on its international editorial and advisory boards. The journal's founding editorial board chair was Professor Nathan Lewis from the California Institute of Technology, who was succeeded in 2018 by Professor Joe Hupp from the Northwestern University.

I was appointed to the role at the start of 2023. I am proud to lead the EES editorial board. Both the editorial and advisory boards work hard to ensure the published papers are of exceptionally high quality and of interest to our broad readership.

Chinese research dominates highly cited list

EES has benefited consistently by association with members of the Chinese research community. I am glad to share that EES has published highly cited work over the years from Chinese scientists.

Among cutting-edge advances, breakthroughs in energy storage technologies stand out as particularly exemplary. This is demonstrated by our most cited research paper of 2024 so far, which is "Unlocking the local structure of hard carbon to grasp sodium-ion diffusion behaviour for advanced sodium-ion batteries" by Li Yu, Wu Chuan and Bai Ying et al. from Beijing Institute of Technology.

The "story" here is around the essential development of sodium-ion batteries (SIB) due to their far superior sustainability credentials as opposed to more common lithium-ion batteries. The challenge is that the performance of these batteries degrades quickly over time. This study addresses these phenomena, thus forging a path for SIBs to gain widespread commercial use in the near future.

Technical pathways under global carbon goals

I think this decade will be critical for both climate change and sustainable development and our collective future rests on finding ways to make these changes in time.

Although we have come far (in my field of solar photovoltaics we have seen global capacity rise from 13 GWp to over 1 TWp in the time since 2008), we face an unprecedented transition that needs to be faster and more disruptive than anything we have seen to date. It is my ambition that EES will not only continue to serve the community of energy researchers through dissemination of results but promote the most important questions, stimulate new discoveries and strategies, and attract more talent and attention to the field of energy research.

As we progress, challenges associated with implementation will develop, and other topics become more prominent. These may include the use of data science and high throughput experimentation in the search for optimum materials and strategies; integration of different technologies to meet need rather than maximize individual figures of merit; and a greater focus on energy and resource efficiency to minimize scarcity and waste.

Above all, there is a continuing need for new discoveries, ideas and methods that are simply inspired by the challenges of energy and climate change mitigation. The beauty of EES is that its scope allows for all these types of challenge, method and discipline to be included and combined.

I wish our readers and authors the very best success in these critical endeavors and hope that you will submit some of your best work for publication in our journal.

The author is the editorial board chair of Energy & Environmental Science and professor at the Imperial College London.

Journal Review

As a long-term researcher in energy materials, I have always viewed EES as a premier scholarly communication platform bridging fundamental scientific breakthroughs with the global goal of sustainable development.

In this era where "low-carbon energy transition" and "sustainable development" have become shared imperatives, EES has established its leading position in clean energy and environmental sciences through its forward-looking thematic focus, interdisciplinary perspectives, and profound insights into the complex "energy-environment" systems.

EES not only reports frontier advancements in solar energy, hydrogen technologies, fuel cells, and CO_2 emission reduction, but encourages cross-disciplinary innovation and paradigm shifts in energy-environment research.

Furthermore, EES emphasizes how these technological breakthroughs contribute to the greater themes such as "energy equity", "climate resilience" and "ecological security."

As energy-environment sciences undergo deepening innovation, I look forward to working with researchers around the globe to maintain EES's leadership at the cutting edge of future's sustainable energy research.

Bao Xinhe, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and a professor at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, CAS.

Source: Science and Technology Daily