This paper focuses on understanding the difference between East and West Japan with respect to citizens’ subjective views on renewable energy. A comparative analysis was performed for cities in the east and west because renewable energy is a natural resource unique to each location and suitable for a distributed energy network operated under the autonomy of the local community. This paper indicates that the social acceptance of renewable energy and willingness to pay in East Japan is affected by the citizens’ strong concerns about the global environment and willingness to participate in policy-making, while the support of the deregulation of the retail electricity market and development of a distributed power system is more relevant in West Japan.

Cities are increasingly adopting potentially sustainable climate plans. Integrating the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into these plans could help stabilize the climate while generating jobs, narrowing equity gaps, fostering innovation, and delivering other sustainability benefits. Yet, how much cities are integrating the SDGs into climate plans remains poorly understood. This article shed light on this question with a text analysis of SDG “keywords” in climate plans for two British and two Japanese cities. The results revealed that none of the surveyed cities have connected climate with socioeconomic priorities covered in SDG1 (poverty), SDG8 (employment), SDG5 (gender), and SDG10 (inequalities). Meanwhile, the United Kingdom cities made more connections between climate and responsible consumption and production (SDG12) than the Japanese cities. Further, Kyoto, Japan shares a climate-SDGs linkages profile that resembles the United Kingdom cities more than Kawasaki. Though not without limitations, text analysis can facilitate the city-to-city peer learning needed to make urban climate plans sustainable within and across countries.

This article focuses on understanding the factors affecting the subconscious minds of urban citizens in terms of promoting clean energy and deregulation of the electricity sector. Does risk perception related to climate change and nuclear energy effect their choices? Does it differ between cities? A comparative analysis was performed for four cities after the accident at the Tokyo Electric Power Corporation’s (TEPCO)’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in 2011. This article uses a modeling technique based on surveys gathered in 2012. The results show that nuclear risks had a larger influence than climate-change risks with regards to supporting the deregulation of the electricity sector in TEPCO-serviced cities. Meanwhile, in non TEPCO-serviced cities, nuclear risks were more influential when the proportion of nuclear within the energy mix of the local utility was large. When the proportion was low, climate-change risks had the larger influence. Meanwhile, results from all four cities show that there is indeed a positive causal relationship between citizens’ levels of awareness of climate change and energy savings.

Achieving global greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation goals will rest heavily on the performance of national climate and energy policies in Asia. This chapter surveys the climate policy landscape in China, India, Japan and Indonesia to understand the prospects of reaching globally shared climate goals. The survey links the effects of milestone climate and energy policy reforms to key emission drivers identified through a decomposition analysis in each of the four case study countries. Beyond contributing 40% of the world’s CO₂ emissions, these countries are selected to argue a more general point. Although the four countries are formulating policies due to an expanding interest in mitigating climate change, targeted sectors and regulatory approaches differ owing to variations in development levels, resource endowments and policymaking institutions. The chapter therefore illustrates that in the era when climate change is becoming a global imperative, policies will reflect interactions between international agreements pushing for climate policy convergence and national institutional architectures pulling responses in divergent directions.