The dark sides of low-carbon innovations for net-zero transitions: a literature review and priorities for future research

Abstract

The rapid commercialization, diffusion, and adoption of low-carbon innovation will have a pivotal role to play on the path to net-zero emissions globally. Therefore, in the context of climate-change mitigation and decarbonization, it is no surprise that we can observe an inherently optimistic view on the prospects of low-carbon innovation among scholars, specifically in the research domains of innovation management and sustainability transitions. Yet, simply taking for granted that innovation-led decarbonization processes universally will produce beneficial outcomes for society runs the risk of neglecting potential adverse effects or negative consequences that might accompany the deployment of these technologies. Therefore, knowledge of the dark sides of low-carbon innovation is crucial for developing policies and innovation-management strategies that enable truly economically, environmentally, and socially sustainable net-zero transitions. Through a systemic literature review, this study systematizes the extant research on the topic and proposes a typology of negative consequences of low-carbon innovations: (1) Jevons Paradox, (2) social consequences and cultural barriers, (3) economic consequences, and (4) environmental consequences and problem-shifting effects. Based on these categories, we put forward a research agenda with key priorities for future research.

Keywords:

• Low-carbon innovation
• net-zero transitions
• climate-change mitigation
• dark side of innovation
• unintended consequences

Introduction

Ever since the initial publication of Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s seminal work The Theory of Economic Development in 1911, innovation and technological advance have been considered vital drivers and catalysts of economic growth as well as essential factors in societal progression and development (Solow 1956; Andergassen, Nardini, and Ricottilli 2009; Bae and Yoo 2015). In the field of innovation studies, it is frequently taken as axiomatic that innovative activities directly contribute to the competitiveness of a firm or industry and lead to increased productivity and, relatedly, higher national standards of living (Freeman 1994; Lundvall 1992; Ahlstrom 2010; Verspagen 2006). Given this positively connoted view of innovation and its vital effects on developed market economies, it comes as no surprise that academic scholars, practitioners, and policymakers alike consider innovation to play a pivotal part in addressing pressing climate change-mitigation requirements and drastic decarbonization needs to prevent climate change from surpassing 1.5 °C (Matos et al. 2022; Stern and Valero 2021; Takalo and Tooranloo 2021). This critical role that is attributed to innovation is highlighted, for example, by the latest assessment report of Working Group III of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which lists over 300 different low-emission technological and non-technological innovations across the energy, agriculture, building, and transport systems as available mitigation options that could offer substantial potential to reduce net emissions (IPCC 2022).

Nevertheless, the commercialization, diffusion, and adoption of such environmental, eco-, or low-carbon innovations for net-zero transitions – namely, innovations that generate environmental benefits by lowering the emission of pollutants, reducing the consumption of fossil fuels, and improving energy efficiency (Wen et al. 2023; Obobisa, Chen, and Mensah 2022) – must be critically analyzed for a comprehensive understanding, as these innovations may also have unintended negative consequences (Coad et al. 2021). The need to address these outcomes is particularly pronounced for the fields of innovation management and sustainability transitions because these fields are uniquely focused on innovating for net zero, examining how the deployment of low-carbon innovations contributes to achieving ambitious climate targets while managing the transitions toward net-zero economies. There are many examples reported in the literature of such adverse effects and negative consequences of low-carbon innovation as a means for mitigation and decarbonization. These range from energy rebounds, which refers to the counterintuitive situation where improvements in energy efficiency lead to an overall increase in energy consumption (Herring and Roy 2007; Vivanco, Kemp, and van der Voet 2015), to increasingly important issues around equity and justice (Newell and Mulvaney 2013; McCauley and Heffron 2018), as well as problem shifting a situation where an innovation designed to reduce carbon emissions in one area inadvertently causes environmental, social, or economic issues elsewhere (Yang et al. 2012; van den Bergh et al. 2015).

There is a recognition of these phenomena in other research fields, for example, in industrial ecology, where the systemic impacts of low-carbon innovations have been extensively researched (Lifset and Graedel 2002; Graedel and Eckelman 2023), and environmental economics, where the rebound effect in clean energy technologies has been systematically examined (Gillingham et al. 2009). However, the literature on innovation management and sustainability transitions has yet to incorporate these insights fully. This gap is evident in the lack of comprehensive reviews on the topic (for an exception, see Biggi and Giuliani 2021). While a multitude of research exists on accelerating low-carbon innovation diffusion and deployment (cf. Roberts et al. 2018; Malhotra and Schmidt 2020; Andersen et al. 2023), critical analyses of their potentially negative impacts within the context of transitioning to net-zero societies consequently remain scarce (Antal, Mattioli, and Rattle 2020; Markard et al. 2021). The starting point of this article is that we argue that such failure to holistically provide a balanced perspective on low-carbon innovation, where the Janus-headedness of innovating toward net-zero targets is acknowledged, has led to “carbon vision” (Lazarevic and Martin 2016). Caused by a tendency of innovation and transitions scholars to predominantly focus on positive climate impacts at the expense of examining potential second-order problems, downsides, unintended consequences, or negative impacts (Antal, Mattioli, and Rattle 2020; Markard et al. 2023).

Accordingly, this article aims to close this gap by systematically assessing how the potential negative consequences of low-carbon innovations in the context of climate mitigation and decarbonization have been examined in the literature on innovation management and sustainability transitions, thereby contributing to a more balanced view that is essential for informed transitions to net-zero societies. The key research question addressed in this article is: What are the negative consequences, downsides, and unintended impacts associated with the commercialization, diffusion, and adoption of innovations that mitigate climate change? To answer this question, we draw on mixed-review methods to perform a systemic literature review and develop a critical interpretive synthesis on a final set of 101 articles published in academic journals covering innovation management and transitions studies.

The primary contribution of our work is twofold. First, we identify four stylized types of potential adverse effects, downsides, and unintended consequences of low-carbon innovation. Second, we develop a research agenda for the fields of innovation management and transitions research with key priorities for future research that could lead to a more balanced and integrative approach to low-carbon innovation where both positive and negative aspects of low-carbon innovations are acknowledged and enable a shift away from a narrow and linear attention focus of innovation diffusion effects on emission reduction.

The remainder of this article is organized as follows: First, we outline the methodological approach to the systematic literature review, and we then present the results of our literature review. This is followed by a discussion on how these results inform our formulation of four research priorities for low-carbon innovation and our proposed research agenda. We conclude the article with reflections on the theoretical and practical implications of our findings.

Review design

This study draws on a deliberate selection of mixed-review methods. Considering the need for a comprehensive understanding of how the innovation management and transitions literature describes the potential downsides of low-carbon innovation, we first performed a systemic literature review (Snyder 2019; Dresch, Lacerda, and Antunes 2015) to collect a sample of scientific, peer-reviewed articles that problematize negative effects, downsides, and unintended consequences of low-carbon innovations. We chose this approach as many deem it particularly useful to summarize past knowledge on a specific topic of interest and provide novel avenues for future research (Denyer and Tranfield 2009). Second, we utilized qualitative critical interpretive synthesis to analyze the resulting set of relevant articles and conceptualize stylized categories of negative impacts of low-carbon innovation (Dixon-Woods et al. 2006; Torrens et al. 2019). The selection of a systemic literature review followed by a qualitative critical interpretive synthesis was motivated by the specific needs of our research into the dark sides of low-carbon innovation for net zero. Our systematic review provides a comprehensive and unbiased summary of the existing literature, establishing a solid foundation for understanding the current state of knowledge, namely, how the innovation management and transitions field describes low-carbon innovation’s negative consequences, downsides, and unintended impacts.

In contrast, the qualitative critical interpretive synthesis allows for a more nuanced analysis of the collected articles, accommodating the complexity and diversity inherent in assessing negative impacts. Given the emergent nature of some aspects of low-carbon innovation and the myopic way this topic has been addressed in the innovation management and transitions literature so far, other review methods, such as a narrative review (Green, Johnson, and Adams 2006) or meta-analysis (Borenstein et al. 2021), were deemed inappropriate. Narrative reviews lack the structured rigor required for our research objectives of establishing a research agenda. At the same time, a meta-analysis was not feasible due to the scarcity of quantitative studies with comparable metrics in the reviewed research fields. As described in Figure 1, we carried out our research in three phases:

Figure 1. Study protocol of the mixed-method review.

Search strategy, screening, and coding

Since a systematic literature review should follow a clear protocol to ensure both rigor and repeatability (Denyer and Tranfield 2009; Snyder 2019), in addition to the main research question, we formulated the following guiding sub-research questions to articulate the scope and focus of the review more precisely:

1. What type of study is presented to report on negative consequences (empirical, modeling, theoretical, or review) within the innovation management and sustainability transitions literature?

2. What research methods (quantitative, mixed, or qualitative) are employed?

3. What societal sector (e.g., energy, transport, food, industry) is addressed in the study?

4. Where did this negative impact of innovation occur regarding geographic location?

We searched in the Scopus academic database to identify peer-reviewed publications to be included in our systematic review and following interpretive synthesis. We chose this database because it represents one of the largest curated abstract and citation databases for peer-reviewed articles while ensuring the quality of indexed data through rigorous content selection and continuous re-evaluation procedures. We built our search query on the previously published search string of Matos et al. (2022). Additionally, we combined it with additional search terms such as “negative” OR “side effect” OR “downside” OR “unwanted consequence” OR “undesirable effect” OR “irresponsible” and combinations thereof in the title, abstracts, and keywords.¹ To more comprehensively reflect the interdisciplinary nature of innovation management (Linton and Thongpapanl 2004) and sustainability transitions studies (Markard et al. 2012), the search focused on eleven journals encompassing diverse disciplinary perspectives: Technological Forecasting & Social Change, Research Policy, Technology Analysis & Strategic Management, Technovation, Environmental Innovation & Societal Transitions, Sustainability: Science, Practice, and Policy, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, International Journal of Technology Management, Energy Research & Social Science, Journal of Product Innovation Management, and R&D Management. Our rationale for this selection was motivated by the recognized relevance of these journals in the fields of innovation and sustainability transitions studies, as acknowledged by prior systematic literature reviews such as Matos et al. (2022) and Zolfagharian et al. (2019). However, we must recognize that this journal selection also has inherent limitations. By focusing on these specific journals, our scope may inadvertently exclude prominent work from adjacent fields of innovation management, such as industrial ecology and environmental economics, which also offer valuable insights into the dark sides of low-carbon innovation. Nevertheless, this targeted approach was necessary to discern precisely how the core literature of innovation management and transitions research, central to our study’s aim, addresses the dark sides of low-carbon innovation for net zero.

The search was conducted on the May 31, 2023 without any year restrictions and returned 847 articles. In the next step, each author manually screened the title, keywords, and abstracts of the initially identified publications (Dresch, Lacerda, and Antunes 2015). Subsequently, they coded the abstracts to eliminate articles that did not deal specifically with the negative impacts of low-carbon innovations and, thus, were not relevant to the inquiry of this article. We outline the review process and article selection in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Search and selection process flowchart.

The articles included that were rated as relevant to the study’s topic exhibited high heterogeneity regarding disciplinary approaches and research design. Therefore, we decided on a configurative review strategy (Dresch, Lacerda, and Antunes 2015). Following our sub-research questions, we arranged the results around key characteristics and the title, abstract, and keywords coded for (1) article type (empirical, modeling, theoretical, or review), (2) research methods (quantitative, mixed, or qualitative), (3) what societal sector the negative impact of low-carbon innovation was researched in (e.g., energy, transport, food, industry) and (4) where this negative impact occurred in terms of geographic location.

Interpretive synthesis

As a last step, the authors conducted a qualitative critical interpretive synthesis (Dixon-Woods et al. 2006) of the full text of the included articles (n = 101) to understand how the current research body has conceptualized the adverse effects, downsides, or unintended consequences of low-carbon innovation. We began with an open coding phase, marking passages, phrases, or terms that signified core ideas or concepts related to the negative effects of low-carbon innovations. This granular approach generated many codes, which were subsequently grouped based on their similarities, leading to the identification of sub-themes. As the synthesis progressed, we constantly compared new codes with existing ones in an iterative manner following a constant comparative approach. This refined our sub-themes and led to a higher-order abstraction of major thematic areas. Whenever we could interpret findings from two or more studies under a common theme or meta-theme, we synthesized them using the reciprocal translational analysis method synthesis (Dixon-Woods et al. 2006; Melendez-Torres, Grant, and Bonell 2015). This allowed for a harmonized interpretation and understanding, even when studies used different terminologies. The coding scheme underwent several rounds of refinement to ensure consistency, clarity, and comprehensiveness. This involved revisiting articles to verify that the derived typology accurately captured the authors’ intended meanings. This process critically examined and resolved potential overlaps or gaps between typology categories. After iterative coding, comparison, and consolidation cycles, we crystalized four dominant and recurrent themes, which we then structured into the four stylized categories presented in the results.

Results and discussion

Our final search results included 101 articles that explicitly investigated or at least discussed potential negative effects, downsides, and unintended consequences of low-carbon innovation, with the first relevant article published in 2007 (Herring and Roy 2007). As Figure 3 shows, our final set of relevant articles entails very few studies before 2015, when the Paris Agreement was adopted as an international treaty on climate change. Since then, a steady increase in studies that problematize low-carbon innovation regarding reaching net-zero goals can be observed. Especially in 2021 and 2022, the number of relevant peer-reviewed articles from the innovation management and sustainability literature almost doubled yearly, indicating an increasing awareness of the topic.

Figure 3. Number of relevant articles over the years.

In the next section, we first describe the characteristics of the identified articles and then present the typology of negative consequences of low-carbon innovations based on the critical interpretive synthesis of the full-text reviews of 101 articles.

Characteristics of relevant articles

As seen in Figure 4, most articles were empirical among the identified data set, and the authors utilized qualitative research methods to investigate the potential negative consequences of low-carbon innovations. This reflects our focused review within the innovation management and sustainability transitions literature, which often emphasizes qualitative exploration of complex socio-technical phenomena (Hansmeier, Schiller, and Rogge 2021). We acknowledge, however, that our methodological choice, particularly the journal selection, may have influenced this finding. Other fields, notably industrial ecology, tend to engage more with quantitative methods for assessing impacts, such as the rebound effect, burden-shifting, and carbon leakage (cf. Hawkins, Gausen, and Strømman 2012; Styles, Dominguez, and Chadwick 2016). The exclusion of journals from these fields, thus, likely skews our review toward qualitative studies. Nevertheless, quantitative modeling approaches also represented a significant share of the relevant articles among the reviewed articles from the innovation management and transitions literature. By contrast, articles that combined empirical research with theoretical or review approaches or authors using mixed-method research design remained the exception.

Figure 4. Article type and research methods of the identified articles.

The energy system represented the most frequent societal sector under study, where the authors examined the negative consequences of low-carbon innovation (see Figure 5). Once again, it is essential to acknowledge that these findings are only relevant to the reviewed studies from the innovation management and transitions literature. The most cited article in this category (269 citations) was by Herring and Roy (2007). The authors problematize the rebound effect, where energy-efficiency improvements can lead to increased energy use instead of reducing consumption and emissions, challenging the assumption that technological efficiency naturally correlates with environmental benefits. As a result, they argue for a more nuanced understanding of how consumer behavior and economic dynamics interact with technological changes. Five identified articles focused on the transport system. For instance, Peters, van der Werff, and Steg (2018) (35) investigated the importance of innovation-adoption motivation and discussed the risk of unsustainable electric vehicle (EV) use among EV adopters for purely technological or financial reasons. Their study highlights a crucial aspect of low-carbon innovation: aligning consumer motivations with environmental sustainability goals. They found that adopting EVs driven by non-environmental factors might not lead to expected reductions in carbon emissions, pointing to the necessity of integrating behavioral insights into low-carbon policy and innovation management.

Figure 5. Systems under study in the identified articles.

Other scholars also examined the negative consequences of low-carbon innovation in different industry sectors; Swennenhuis, de Gooyert, and de Coninck (2022) provide an essential perspective on the steel industry, arguing that various low-carbon innovations could have divergent impacts on social equity and justice. They emphasize the importance of incorporating social dimensions into decarbonization processes, advocating for a just transition that adequately considers the effects on all stakeholders. Meanwhile, in their textile-industry study, Köhler and Som (2014) examine the complexities of managing risks associated with emerging low-carbon innovations. They discuss the necessity for proactive risk-management strategies to mitigate innovations’ unintended environmental and social impacts, stressing the need for a balanced approach between rapid technological advancements and sustainable development.

In the field of Earth-system studies, our data set included reviews and investigations of dangers and unforeseen consequences of solar geoengineering, with McLaren (2018) providing a critical examination of the risks and ethical considerations surrounding solar geoengineering. This work contributes significantly to the debate on geoengineering, highlighting the potential for large-scale interventions to have far-reaching and unpredictable consequences on global climate systems. Further, identified articles problematized the negative impact of low-carbon innovation in the ongoing dietary transition in the food system, such as Kaljonen et al. (2021) and Liang, Tang, and Fu (2023), exploring the complex interplay between dietary changes, sustainability transitions, and innovation. They discuss how the transition toward plant-based or alternative diets, while beneficial in reducing carbon footprints, can also lead to unintended ecological and social consequences, necessitating a comprehensive approach to food-system innovation. Despite these calls for more holistic approaches, the authors of the reviewed articles predominantly focused their studies on one societal sector rather than investigating the potential negative consequences of low-carbon innovations across multiple systems.

The findings of the review of our data set further revealed that negative effects, downsides, or unintended consequences of low-carbon innovation had been studied across 46 countries (see Figure 6 for all identified locations). Global North countries represented almost half of the geographical areas of study, with authors choosing the United States (9), the UK (7), and Germany (6) as their most frequent case countries. We observed a more extensive variety of study locations among global South countries. Yet, apart from China (6), the data set of relevant articles only entailed one or two studies per country. Comparative case studies between different countries or analyses across multiple countries were also infrequently performed. Exceptions included two articles that presented an analysis across global South countries (Chen et al. 2021; de Souza et al. 2018), one comparative study between countries (Martiskainen, Sovacool, and Hook 2021), and two comparative studies between global North and South countries (Ribeiro and Quintanilla 2015; Sovacool, Hess, and Cantoni 2021).

Figure 6. Study locations, indicating the number of articles per country and global North/South distribution.

Critical interpretive synthesis of articles focusing on the dark sides of low-carbon innovation

Through the critical interpretive synthesis of the 101 articles, four stylized categories of negative impacts of low-carbon innovation emerged. Given the transdisciplinary nature of the innovation-studies field and the many different types of low-carbon innovations under study in our data set, we encountered many potential negative consequences and downsides and further developed sub-categories for all. Figure 7 outlines these four stylized categories with their respective sub-coding themes, each of which we further discuss below. Due to space constraints, the examples to illustrate each category in the following section were chosen either based on citation frequency² or on the subjective opinion of the reviewers that the article content served as a particularly representative example of the developed category. It is worth noting that many of the articles of the data sample described negative consequences relevant to two or even three of our stylized categories. Hence, the categories are intertwined, and one negative consequence is often the result of another.

Figure 7. Four stylized categories of potential dark sides of low-carbon innovations with sub-coding themes.

Category I: Jevons Paradox

The first category developed through the critical synthesis problematizes that the diffusion and adoption of low-carbon innovations targeted at increasing the efficiency of how goods, services, or material resources (e.g., energy or transport) are consumed frequently result in cost reductions, which in turn increase accessibility, leading to more demand and consumption. The efficiency gains and environmental savings of low-carbon innovations might be “taken back” due to the effect of lower prices on consumer behavior. Jevons first described this effect in “The Coal Question” (1865) in the context of an industry-wide adoption of a more efficient coal-fired steam engine that nevertheless increased coal consumption. Consequently, this negative effect has been labeled the Jevons Paradox. In our review, we coded 20 articles discussing this adverse effect of low-carbon innovation. Herring and Roy (2007) represent the most-cited article in this category and the systematic literature review with 269 citations (see Appendix B). In this set of articles, authors predominantly examine cases of environmental rebounds. This term describes scenarios where anticipated environmental advantages stemming from the deployment of low-carbon innovation are counterbalanced by heightened consumption rates, thereby risking an escalation in total emissions. In addition to the findings of Herring and Roy (2007), we recognize the contribution of other seminal works that provide a broader understanding of the rebound effect, which we did not include in our review due to our focus on innovation management and sustainability transitions literature. For example, Gillingham et al. (2013) present evidence suggesting that the rebound effect may be overestimated, arguing that energy-efficiency improvements do not always lead to proportionate increases in overall consumption. Furthermore, Sorrell, Dimitropoulos, and Sommerville (2009) review literature indicating that rebound effects are generally minor, often not leading to a complete negation of energy-efficiency gains. Similarly, recent research suggests that the long-term rebound effects are smaller than short-term ones (Amjadi, Lundgren, and Zhou 2022). Finally, Vivanco, Kemp, and van der Voet (2014) analyze the transportation sector, contributing valuable insights into the complexities of measuring and managing rebound effects in this domain. These works collectively suggest that the implications of the rebound effect are multifaceted and context dependent. In contrast, energy rebounds, also frequently researched in this subset of reviewed articles, refer to the surge in energy usage itself, often triggered by efficiency improvements that can reduce energy prices, subsequently driving up energy or fuel consumption. Understanding the nuances between these two concepts is crucial for grasping the complex, unintended consequences of low-carbon innovations: While both may stem from heightened efficiency, an environmental rebound relates to situations where the decrease in environmental impact per unit, such as lower emissions per activity, leads to amplified consumption levels overall, which might eclipse the initial efficiency benefits. Conversely, energy rebound is a narrower term focusing on increased energy consumption as a direct consequence of efficiency improvements leading to reduced energy costs.

Examples of environmental rebounds include Akimoto, Sano, and Oda (2022), who point out that the realization of the emission-reduction potential of ride- and car-sharing with fully autonomous vehicles is directly linked to a reduction in the number of cars on the road. However, the authors also point out that the large-scale adoption of this low-carbon innovation might generate increased demand for this form of travel; hence, estimated emission- reduction effects may be in jeopardy. Similarly, Richter et al. (2022) also saw increased road traffic and related emissions through the uptake of autonomous vehicles with low occupancy rates. Marletto (2019) warns that an unregulated diffusion of autonomous vehicles could increase transport demand, resulting in uncertain emission reductions. Also, the broad deployment of artificial intelligence in different industrial sectors to solve environmental sustainability problems must be viewed critically due to the technology’s current high ecological footprint (Kopka and Grashof 2022). In this context, it is essential to differentiate between the increased use of a product or service leading to higher emissions, referred to as environmental rebound, versus the increased energy consumption due to more efficient and, therefore, cheaper energy use, referred to as energy rebound. The diffusion and adoption of low-carbon innovation to improve the circularity of our current production system might have unintended negative consequences: Despeisse et al.’s (2017) study emphasizes how 3D printing applied to enable a circular manufacturing system might potentially result in less environmentally efficient localized production. Combined with an increasing demand for customized goods, the adoption of 3D printing, instead of contributing to the fulfillment of circular economy principles, results in a higher rate of product obsolescence and a surge in resource consumption. To counter such adverse effects, Alfredsson et al. (2018) argue that considerations of reducing related consumption and production are necessary for effective technological solutions to mitigate climate change.

The second sub-category in this sample of synthesized articles deals with the reverse effects of energy rebounds, defined by Herring and Roy (2007, 195) as “the extent of the energy saving produced by an efficiency investment that is taken back by consumers in the form of higher consumption, either in the form of more hours of use or a higher quality of energy service.” This notably differs from the environmental rebound, where the concern is increased energy use and broader environmental degradation. Seebauer’s (2018) study, for example, examines how such an energy rebound develops over time as households gradually rearrange their everyday consumption routines and travel patterns (e.g., fewer trips using public transport) after adopting an EV. Similarly, Franceschini and Pansera (2015) argue that in the lighting sector, the introduction of energy-efficient innovations is not enough to ensure environmental sustainability but rather, a transformation of current policies, business models, and consumer practices must go hand in hand with the diffusion and adoption of low-carbon innovation. Also, existing regulatory frameworks and energy-pricing mechanisms may contribute to this effect: Galvin et al.’s (2022) study among German households with photovoltaic (PV) panels revealed that these so-called prosumer households overconsume electricity, encouraged by the lower prices of their own produced electricity. Their article also points out that Germany’s current regulatory and pricing regime is set up in a way that may reward prosumer households’ unsustainable consumption behavior, thus contributing to high energy rebounds. Similarly, Kern et al.’s (2022) model showed a 20% rebound effect from the industry-wide transition to more energy-efficient low-carbon innovations in the German manufacturing sector. They further tested a variety of policy sets (e.g., carbon-dioxide (CO₂) pricing, working time reduction, or tax reforms) to counteract such energy rebounds that put national energy reduction and climate change at risk, hence emphasizing the need for adequate policy action. Also, Lindgren et al. (2023) provide a critical discussion on the Swedish government’s energy-efficiency strategies, which aim to minimize environmental impacts through technological advancements. However, these strategies often encounter rebound effects that diminish the anticipated energy savings. Consequently, the authors recommend pairing these efficiency strategies with sufficiency policies targeting a reduction in energy consumption to manage energy rebounds effectively.

Finally, in the context of the global South, the diffusion and adoption of energy-efficient, low-carbon innovation may also lead to energy rebounds. An example of this is Hills, Μichalena, and Chalvatzis (2018), who discuss how the implementation of the renewable energy system based on solar PV in an indigenous and vulnerable island community in Fiji resulted in an energy rush where each household tried to maximize its energy consumption due to the low pricing of electricity. They argue that placing such low-carbon innovation in a traditional village without properly discussing how energy use should be organized or educating villagers about energy-consumption behaviors heightens the risk of a negative energy rebound. In this sub-category of reviewed articles, the energy rebound, thus, is not merely an increase in energy use but also includes socioeconomic factors that may lead to broader sustainability issues.

Category II: social consequences and cultural barriers

A second perspective that developed clearly from the critical synthesis of the literature relates to negative social consequences and cultural barriers to low-carbon innovations. In total, 58 articles in our data set referred to this stylized category, and the most cited was by Delicado, Figueiredo, and Silva (2016), who problematize adverse health effects on citizens living near wind farms in Portugal and the misplacement of these communities when building such low-carbon infrastructure in archaeological heritage.

In this subset of articles, authors frequently reported that low-carbon innovations could exacerbate existing inequalities, thus highlighting emerging energy-justice challenges (Jenkins et al. 2016). For example, facing today’s reality where “energy poverty” is advancing as a deep problem in many European countries, low-carbon innovation that can improve energy efficiency in housing may seem straightforward. However, as von Platten et al. (2022) discuss, it is not necessarily a just decarbonization measure from a social perspective, as it risks even higher costs for low-income tenants, potentially violating the tenets of distributive justice by not equitably distributing the benefits and burdens of energy transitions. While smaller investments in energy retrofitting in multifamily housing can lead to cost relief, more significant investments entail a considerable cost burden for tenants. The tension which arises from this is that low-investment energy retrofit is often insufficient to meet future challenges, and low-income tenants cannot pay for appropriate high-investment retrofitting. This exclusion raises concerns about procedural justice, where equitable participation in decision-making processes is not upheld, and recognition justice, where these citizens’ diverse needs and circumstances are not recognized. Similarly, Andreas, Burns, and Touza (2018) problematize that in Bulgaria, the cost burden for renewable energy innovations such as solar PV is primarily on consumers, thus excluding those with lower incomes from participating in the energy transition. Ransan-Cooper et al. (2022) also found an increase in the inequalities of accessing cheaper electricity and distributive injustice impacts between citizens of different neighborhoods in their study on neighborhood battery-storage projects in Australia.

Negative social consequences of low-carbon innovation exist in energy-related sectors and other industries, such as the textile industry. Köhler and Som (2014) show how introducing nano-textiles and smart textiles has caused risks to human health and safety. Such negative health impacts of low-carbon innovations on residents were also prominent in the study of Fergen, Jacquet, and Shukla (2021) on wind turbines in rural Ohio. Thus, without strategies for anticipatory management of health and safety risks, low-carbon innovation might harm human well-being at different magnitudes. Additionally, concerns around citizens’ privacy and data-rights violations were also problematized in this subset, specifically for smart energy innovations that rely on sharing electricity use/generation data, such as smart meters (Raimi and Carrico 2016; Hmielowski et al. 2019; Simon and Schweitzer 2023) and residential uses of solar panels (Snow et al. 2022).

Another negative impact of low-carbon innovations that authors reported on was the marginalization and infringement of procedural justice and recognition justice (i.e., not being involved in the decision-making process and disrespect of indigenous rights and traditional land use) as well as misplacement of indigenous peoples when planning and building low-carbon innovation infrastructure projects, for example, wind farms and transmission lines in Colombia (Vega-Araujo and Heffron 2022) and hydropower dams in the Brazilian rainforest (Mayer et al. 2021) as well as Mapuche territory (Kelly 2019). Land-use conflicts related to low-carbon innovation infrastructure developments that arise from inadequate engagement of the local communities affected during planning and construction phases represented a frequently discussed issue in the reviewed literature (Mueller and Brooks 2020; Dye 2020; Frantál, Frolova, and Liñán-Chacón 2023). In the worst case, a lack of community involvement in renewable energy projects, such as the Lake Turkana Wind Farm in Kenya, may lead to violent conflicts between local communities over the benefits and access to resources (Lomax, Mirumachi, and Hautsch 2023).

Additionally, given the fact that low-carbon innovations are predominantly developed in the global North, their diffusion and adoption in the global South may face unaccounted-for cultural barriers and again result in untended negative outcomes: The push of people toward low-carbon cooking solutions such as electric stoves in Nepal was not tailored to cultural and practical needs of citizens, and, thus, instead of reducing emissions resulted in fuel stacking (Bharadwaj et al. 2021). Similarly, decentralized electrification through the rapid adoption of off-grid solar products in Malawi without installation or repair services widely available in the country only provided short-lived solutions to existing energy-poverty issues (Samarakoon et al. 2022).

Finally, one more critical aspect of the diffusion and adoption of low-carbon innovation is its potential to increase existing North/South divides through the asymmetrical exploitation of resources. This includes the pursuit of mining for rare earth minerals to be used in the transitions toward net-zero emissions exploitation of solar resources in Africa by energy-cooperation projects from the North (de Souza et al. 2018), or raw materials for batteries such as cobalt, lithium, or copper (Kramarz, Park, and Johnson 2021). Therefore, these projects risk furthering of historical power imbalances rooted in colonialism or, even worse, leading to a second wave of colonization. Again, this is related to issues of distributive justice in the sense that there is a need for equitable sharing of the burdens and benefits of net-zero transitions between the global North and South.

Category III: economic consequences

A third scholarly perspective that emerged from the interpretative synthesizes problematized potential negative economic consequences that may arise from the commercialization, diffusion, and adoption of low-carbon innovations. This category represented the smallest set of articles among the four, with 16 articles in our synthesis coded as problematizing economic aspects of ongoing innovation-led decarbonization processes. All articles are relatively recent publications published between 2015 and 2023, with citations ranging from 36 to 0. In this sample, the described economic consequences ranged from potential impacts on business-level competitiveness and industry developments to negative effects on regional prosperity and national economic growth.

Additionally, our review revealed negative economic consequences for businesses that fail to develop new technological competencies or reconfigure organizational skills in response to low-carbon transitions. Arifin (2022) illustrated this negative consequence for firms unprepared for low-carbon transitions through a case study on Indonesian power utilities. His empirical assessment shows how a lack of new competencies in solar PV, battery storage, and smart grids adversely impacted these firms. He highlights that the ongoing shift toward renewable energy products is disrupting the status quo in the existing market, and those utilities that cannot reshape their business model experience a significant negative effect on their firm’s competitive advantage. Further, through a set of quantitative analyses, Arifin (2022) confirms the negative impact of solar PV diffusion on financial performance, specifically the utilities’ revenues, as customers with rooftop solar become energy producers that pay less to utilities. Nonfinancial performances such as quality of service are also affected as a high penetration rate of PVs in the distribution grid leads to challenges in the operation of voltage-regulating devices in the system, leading to power losses. Similarly, Lin et al. (2021) argue that a firm’s performance will be negatively affected, at least in the initial adoption phase of low-carbon innovations. Groenewoudt and Romijn (2022), moreover, criticize in their review that under the current corporate-led market-based model, it becomes impossible for off-grid solar businesses in the global South to meet sales and profit targets while also advancing sustainability goals such as enabling access to solar PV for the energy poor and rural populations.

Swennenhuis, de Gooyert, and de Coninck (2022) problematize justice aspects of deep emission reductions in the steel industry. They argue that regional economic prosperity is at risk as steel-production sites must be shifted based on the geographical availability of low-carbon innovations that could enable CO₂-neutral steel production, such as low-carbon hydrogen or CO₂ storage reservoirs. A deep decarbonization in the sector under study thus might entail shutting down existing steel plants and relocating the industry. This would not only have far-reaching impacts on the industry itself but also result in a collapse in economic activities in regions that currently produce steel. It would also negatively affect secondary economic activities that benefit the communities in the steel-dependent areas. Such industrialization quickly has a ripple effect as many regional businesses are connected to the steel production-supply chain through different clusters and, in turn, might also be forced to close. In this study, negative economic consequences of low-carbon innovation are inevitably connected to social outcomes, such as rising unemployment in the affected regions (Swennenhuis, de Gooyert, and de Coninck 2022).

Additionally, our data sample entailed several studies that examined the potential negative economic impacts of the diffusion and adoption of low-carbon innovations on the nature-based tourism industry. These included hydropower plants, wind farms, and transmission lines in Iceland (Stefánsson, Sæþórsdóttir, and Hall 2017; Tverijonaite et al. 2022), an offshore wind farm on Block Island, Rhode Island, United States (Smythe et al. 2020), and wind farms in Nairobi National Park, Kenya (Nordman and Mutinda 2016). The visual impacts of such infrastructure projects were not necessarily perceived as unfavorable by all tourists (Nordman and Mutinda 2016), and viewpoints across the surveyed population samples were diverse (Smythe et al. 2020). Nevertheless, especially in areas where tourists expected wilderness and unspoiled nature, the presence of renewable energy infrastructure negatively affected their interest in traveling around the regions and their motivation to visit the areas in the first place (Stefánsson, Sæþórsdóttir, and Hall 2017).

Finally, Marína and Goya (2021) also raise attention to the problems emerging economies face that specialize in mining minerals required for commercializing low-carbon innovation, including EVs or solar panels. As the demand for such low-carbon innovation increases worldwide, countries rich in mineral resources, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Botswana, experience new opportunities for foreign investments, increased exports, and fiscal revenues. However, the mining sector in these countries has been especially vulnerable to bribery and corruption, resulting in distortions of incentives and the misallocation of resources. Consequently, instead of benefiting from the increased demand for minerals, the political stability of these nations might be negatively affected, and their economic development might be stunted.

Category IV: environmental consequences and problem-shifting effects

A fourth and final scholarly discussion in the corpus of analyzed literature pointed toward negative environmental consequences and problem-shifting effects that result from the commercialization, diffusion, and adoption of low-carbon innovation for climate-change mitigation and decarbonization. In our review, we coded 33 articles as addressing these negative impacts, and the most-cited article was Delicado, Figueiredo, and Silva’s (2016) study of the adverse environmental effects of wind farms in Portugal. As indicated in the category name in this set of articles, the authors described that reducing emissions through low-carbon innovations frequently caused the emergence of new, or exacerbated existing, environmental issues. Such effects in the literature include problem-shifting toward (1) resource degradation (Droubi, Heffron, and McCauley 2022) and (2) increased waste, as discussed by Samarakoon et al. (2022), where, in Sub-Saharan countries, the large-scale adoption of off-grid solar solutions without appropriate plans to take care of the waste occurring at the end-of-life phase has led to large amounts of e-waste. (3) Increased pollution from green extractivism (Khan 2019; Marín and Goya 2021; Dunlap and Riquito 2023) stems, for example, from the discharges of metals and other elements to soil and groundwater while mining for minerals required for EV batteries. (4) Carbon leakages, namely, increased emissions in one country (often in the global South) as a result of emission reductions in another country (Süsser et al. 2022), create a counter-sustainable asymmetry (Ribeiro and Quintanilla 2015). This concept not only suggests a spatial shift of environmental problems, where the detrimental impacts are transferred from one geographic location to another, but it also implies a temporal shift. The temporal dimension is less direct but just as critical. Action taken to reduce emissions in the short term in one area can lead to increased, more intensive industrial activities in another, potentially postponing and exacerbating environmental degradation in the long term.

Further, the review highlights the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem degradation as potential consequences of commercializing low-carbon innovations. In a study of biofuels in the United States, Trumbo and Tonn (2016) identified key factors that can enable a sustainable energy future. However, they warned that biofuels, although representing a good alternative to fossil fuels, also drive deforestation. Similarly, the deforestation and siltation of rivers from the construction and use of hydropower also negatively impact biodiversity and ecosystem health (Kelly 2019; Grant et al. 2021). Although not currently occurring, Reynold’s (2021) review of Earth-system interventions warns of the potentially devastating effects of solar geoengineering and CO₂ removal on Earth’s many complex ecosystems and species. Aczel et al. (2022) and Low, Baum, and Sovacool (2022) also further problematize such potential disruptions of the natural system and ecological disturbance due to large-scale deployment of low-carbon innovations related to climate geoengineering. This is a typical example where the dark side of low-carbon innovation becomes fully visible when the scale of deployment increases – during confined, supervised test deployments, climate geoengineering might appear harmless. However, when deployed on a global scale, the negative consequences of this type of innovation could be unprecedented (Aczel et al. 2022; Low, Baum, and Sovacool 2022).

Finally, the overexploitation of global freshwater and water scarcity are also of concern in the context of innovation toward net-zero societies, as shown in the reviewed articles from the innovation management and sustainability transitions literature. A study that stresses this is by Süsser et al. (2022). Based on a review of energy-modeling approaches, they state that energy models often fail to integrate environmental constraints, for example, raw material or water availability, thus creating a bias in future scenarios toward overly optimistic and misleading forecasts that potentially project an illusion of both the speed and the impact of unfolding net-zero transitions.

Future research: four priorities to guide a research agenda

Our systematic literature review and critical synthesis revealed that unintended negative consequences might accompany the accelerated commercialization, diffusion, and adoption of low-carbon innovation across various industry sectors and geographic locations globally under the urgency of reducing emissions to mitigate global warming. This highlights the challenges of ensuring the equitable distribution of innovation benefits and mitigating socioeconomic disparities. We believe that this article’s systemization of the extant research on the multitude of these different potential dark sides of low-carbon innovation represents the first necessary step toward a more balanced view of the prospects of low-carbon innovation in which the potential challenges of innovating toward net-zero societies are also acknowledged. Opportunities for advancing this field lie in integrating frameworks from existing domains that assess and integrate social impacts, promoting responsible innovation that aligns with social sustainability. Taking this work one step further, the rest of the discussion outlines how the results of this review may inform avenues for further exploration by proposing key priorities that should guide a research agenda on the topic. In light of this research agenda, we foresee the evolution of research on low-carbon innovation to increasingly incorporate interdisciplinary methods that address both temporal and spatial dimensions of sustainability. This will likely involve a shift toward anticipatory innovation management that accelerates the diffusion of low-carbon technologies and proactively considers their societal impacts, ensuring inclusive benefits across the global North and South.

Framing low-carbon innovation as a response to global problems

While our study highlighted that a broad consensus exists that low-carbon innovations will be vital in addressing pressing global challenges of climate-change mitigation and decarbonization, the reviewed articles nevertheless rarely focus on the global consequences of low-carbon innovation deployment. Studies in economic history show how innovation typically develops as a response to problems or imbalances in society and often in the form of major technological shifts for economic development in a specific industry sector (cf. Taalbi 2017). Yet, such reactive, context-specific, and path-dependent (Rogers, Singhal, and Quinlan 2014) innovation-diffusion processes may lack the ability to respond to the global net-zero requirements holistically and reflexively. Innovations have historically evolved from business practices, and this study exemplified how the scope of low-carbon innovation commercialization is still frequently driven by the interests of private sector actors and predominantly serves the global North. This might mean that low-carbon innovations for net zero are constrained by myopic requirements such as increasing competitiveness (Arifin 2022), green growth imperatives (Vezzoni 2023), or reaching short-term sales targets (Lin et al. 2021) as well as existing market structures (Groenewoudt and Romijn 2022).

Additionally, our review highlighted that extant studies predominantly employ qualitative methods and tend to report on the negative consequences of low-carbon innovation deployment in a single industry sector in a single country with a significant bias toward the energy sector. However, research predominantly focused on the corporate level or single industry sector, and dealing with whether firms can benefit from innovating for net-zero cannot do justice to the global societal issues we face. While matters of industry competitiveness and economic prosperity (Swennenhuis, de Gooyert, and de Coninck 2022) remain one aspect of the commercialization, diffusion, and adoption of low-carbon innovation, there is a need for future studies to widen their analytical scope and develop methods that can aid in the analysis of low-carbon innovation activities and their potential negative consequences across multiple sectors, industries, and at a global scale with the inclusion of and consideration for a broader range of societal actors. Comparative studies, like those by Ribeiro and Quintanilla (2015) and Sovacool, Hess, and Cantoni (2021) spanning both the global North and South, are instrumental in capturing a more globalized narrative.

Socially responsible low-carbon innovation across all life cycle stages

As illustrated through our Social Consequences and Cultural Barriers category, low-carbon innovations are frequently accompanied by various societal implications at multiple stages throughout their product/service life cycles. Innovating for net-zero targets is not always aligned with social sustainability objectives and, in some cases, even exacerbates injustice. Such social implications may occur at the raw material-sourcing stage (Marína and Goya 2021; Ahmadi et al., 2021), during the implementation stage (Vega-Araujo and Heffron 2022; Mayer et al. 2021), during the use stage (Hargreaves, Hargreaves, and Chilvers 2022), or at the end-of-life of low-carbon innovation (Groenewoudt and Romijn 2022). While life cycle assessment methodologies to calculate the environmental impacts of low-carbon innovation at all stages of its life cycle have already become a mainstream method in other research domains, frameworks such as the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) social life cycle assessment (S-LCA) framework, GRI, ISO26000, and the Just-R framework (Dutta et al. 2023) do exist for assessing the social impacts. Yet, their application to innovation management and sustainability transitions studies on the dark side of low-carbon innovation remains largely absent. Accordingly, most reviewed articles in this study laid their empirical focus on a specific stage in the low-carbon innovation diffusion process in a particular geographical context. However, such a narrow analytical scope may not account for the negative social consequences of low-carbon innovation along its whole product/service value chain globally and at all life cycle stages.

We recognize these frameworks as significant contributions and emphasize the need for their further integration into innovation management and sustainability transitions research, especially when examining the societal repercussions of low-carbon innovations. Consequently, future research should explore each life cycle stage in-depth, delving deeper into societal challenges at each phase in diverse geographies and industrial contexts. Another fruitful avenue for research could be cross-stage comparative studies, contrasting societal impacts across various stages to identify particularly problematic or harmful phases from a social justice and equity perspective, thereby guiding more precise interventions. Given our review’s emphasis on specific geographical areas, there is a compelling argument for expanding the focus of future studies to underrepresented or diverse regions, considering the unique socioeconomic and cultural dynamics they bring. Such expansion will help better gauge the societal implications of these innovations in varied contexts. Building upon foundational works, notably Sovacool, Hess, and Cantoni (2021), there is an apparent demand for developing comprehensive, robust analytical frameworks to analyze the social and justice implications of low-carbon innovations from cradle to grave. We thus call for broader adoption and application of established methods, such as UNEP’s S-LCA framework, which can provide such a comprehensive assessment within innovation and sustainability transitions studies. These tools should address the broad spectrum of societal impacts across an innovation’s life cycle and demonstrate the flexibility to adapt across different sectors and geographies.

Developing a temporal and spatial understanding of the low-carbon innovation-diffusion process

While one of the foundational ideas behind sustainability, as put forward in the United Nations Brundtland Report in 1987, is the care of future generations and future ecosystems, our results revealed that when it comes to the deployment of low-carbon innovations, too often, short-term decarbonization goals are prioritized over broader sustainable development goals. Such a prioritization, however, tends to push the dark side of various low-carbon innovations either in time toward the future, for example, the usage of biofuels (Trumbo and Tonn 2016), or in place toward global South countries, for instance, the careless extraction of rare minerals needed for the energy transition (Marína and Goya 2021). While these negative consequences of low-carbon innovations might be out of sight temporally or from the perspectives of global North citizens, they will only disappear if equal importance is given to reducing emissions and avoiding negative impacts on future generations and the global South. Thus, to shift the focus from pursuing a single objective, decarbonization, a more sustainable way of innovating for net zero, we must consider both temporal and spatial perspectives on the dark sides of this process. This implies that more future research is needed that explicitly considers a variety of scenarios and potential consequences of low-carbon innovation deployment over a more extended period and across various social-ecological systems. Such research could be informed through longitudinal studies and comparative case studies focusing on different regions and countries to reveal and compare how the dark sides of low-carbon innovations might appear in different forms and scopes over their whole diffusion process.

Moving toward anticipatory innovation management and policy mixes

Finally, the synthesized body of literature exhibited a lack of existing innovation-management strategies and stringent combinations of policy instruments that can anticipate and, thus, prevent potential adverse effects that may arise from the commercialization, diffusion, and adoption of low-carbon innovation. Innovation management has long been a practice of rationality and efficiency in line with Rogers (1995) innovation-diffusion process. Adding to that, as potential unintended consequences of the deployment of low-carbon innovations are starting to become apparent, policymakers have yet to find a way to consider such dark sides to be able to design efficient policy instruments (Kern et al. 2022). Thus, more research on directing innovation management and related policy mixes toward a more anticipatory orientation is required. This implies a process of expanded perception, more reflexivity, and a reconceptualization of the political economy to include the values of future generations and not just the short-term decarbonization targets. Deploying low-carbon innovations can be better aligned with urgent societal needs while acknowledging ethical concerns and potential negative environmental effects. Our results, therefore, call for future studies that specifically consider how both management strategies and policy mixes for low-carbon innovations can be developed in such a way that they not only support the rapid commercialization, diffusion, and adoption of low-carbon innovations but also counterbalance the potential dark sides in an anticipatory manner.

Conclusion and implications

Low-carbon innovations are expected to significantly enable sustainable development, global decarbonization processes, and ongoing transitions to net-zero societies (Matos et al. 2022). This study engaged critically with the potential dark sides of the deployment of low-carbon innovation in the context of climate-change mitigation and asked the research question, “What are the negative consequences, downsides, and unintended impacts associated with the commercialization, diffusion, and adoption of innovations that mitigate climate change?” Despite the actuality of climate-change mitigation and the accelerated deployment of low-carbon innovations globally, our study highlighted that the academic debate on the dark sides of low-carbon innovation for net zero is still in its infancy and rather myopic. By systematically investigating potential downsides, unintended consequences, or negative impacts of low-carbon innovations, our study contributes both to theory and practice.

From a theoretical perspective, three aspects are worth mentioning. First, because current research on low-carbon innovation has predominantly focused on its bright side, namely, its positive prospects, with a strong theoretical foundation in linear innovation-diffusion theory, the dark sides of low-carbon innovation have remained frequently neglected. This study allows for a comprehensive understanding of the dark sides of low-carbon innovation for net zero. It thus contributes to a more balanced perspective on the prospects of low-carbon innovation in which both the positive and negative aspects are accounted for. Second, our research conceptualized a typology with four stylized categories of such potential dark sides of low-carbon innovation and further identified noteworthy sub-categories through mixed-review methods. While previous research has predominantly approached low-carbon innovations with inherent optimism, we believe our stylized categories can foster a more reflexive view, particularly as these innovations are implemented on a broader scope and scale to achieve net-zero targets. Finally, by providing four key priorities to guide future research, this article highlights the need for a more globally coordinated, multisectoral, justice-minded, and anticipatory innovation-diffusion perspective for truly economically, environmentally, and socially sustainable net-zero transitions. The key implication of our work that should drive future research is that it cannot be taken for granted that innovating toward net zero is inherent without negative impacts or adverse effects.

From a practical perspective, this research makes two broad contributions. First, our study offers practitioners and policymakers alike a comprehensive knowledge base on the dark sides of low-carbon innovation that can inform better innovation-management strategies and more efficient policy development. Second, our findings also highlight that planning for the large-scale commercialization, diffusion, and adoption of low-carbon innovations will require more analytical efforts to understand the various barriers to their efficient deployment. By revealing potential social, cultural, and economic barriers, this study enables future planning processes to reach net-zero targets and more carefully consider various factors that might hamper the efficient deployment of low-carbon innovations.

Finally, we outlined some limitations of this study: The exclusion of non-peer-reviewed articles, publication languages other than English, the selection of keywords, and the explicit search focus on articles published in eleven high-impact innovation journals might mean we overlooked other relevant material. Similarly, our choice of the scientific database could imply that we missed some relevant articles published in journals that were not included in the Scopus database. Further, the exclusion and inclusion criteria applied to the initial data set of the search were solely based on the authors’ own judgment. Nevertheless, narrowing down the search results was necessary to balance analytical constraints while performing a full-article synthesis of the most relevant articles. In addition, we may have limited our exposure to a broader array of interdisciplinary insights by concentrating our review on eleven selected journals and focusing exclusively on innovation management and sustainability transitions literature. While allowing for a focused analysis, these selection criteria constitute a notable limitation of our study. They potentially exclude significant studies from adjacent disciplines, such as industrial ecology and environmental economics, that could offer complementary insights into the dark sides of low-carbon innovation. Our review, therefore, provides a specific snapshot of how a particular scholarly community addresses the dark sides of low-carbon innovation for net zero within, and we encourage future research to extend the dialogue by including broader interdisciplinary contributions.

Despite these limitations, we aim for our exploration to contribute to the sustainability transitions literature by examining potential downsides, unintended consequences, and negative impacts of deploying low-carbon innovations. This work intends to balance the predominant focus on their positive prospects in the context of decarbonization and mitigation and to spur further investigation into the overlooked complexities of innovating for net-zero goals.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no competing interests to report.

Notes

1 The full search string can be found in Appendix A.

2 The top-cited articles from this review can be found in Appendix B.

Appendix A.

Scopus search string

(TITLE-ABS-KEY (“climat* change” OR “global warming” OR “climate warming” OR “climate mitigation” OR “energy” OR “low-carbon transitions” OR “low-carbon innovation” OR “green technology” OR “green innovation” OR “eco innovation” OR “sustainable innovation” OR “environmental innovation” OR “low-carbon technology” OR “decarbonization” OR “sustainable development”) AND (“negative” OR “side effect” OR “downside” OR “unwanted consequence” OR “undesirable effect” OR “irresponsible” OR “dark side of innovation” OR “negative impact” OR “environmental disaster” OR “harm” OR “unintended” OR “harmful technologies” OR “problem shifting” OR “rebound effect”)) AND (LIMIT-TO (SRCTYPE, “j”)) AND (LIMIT-TO (DOCTYPE, “ar”)) AND (LIMIT-TO (EXACTSRCTITLE, “Research Policy”) OR LIMIT-TO (EXACTSRCTITLE, “Technological Forecasting And Social Change”) OR LIMIT-TO (EXACTSRCTITLE, “IEEE Transactions On Engineering Management”) OR LIMIT-TO (EXACTSRCTITLE, “Technovation”) OR LIMIT-TO (EXACTSRCTITLE, “International Journal Of Technology Management”) OR LIMIT-TO (EXACTSRCTITLE, “Journal Of Product Innovation Management”) OR LIMIT-TO (EXACTSRCTITLE, “Technology Analysis And Strategic Management”) OR LIMIT-TO (EXACTSRCTITLE, “Sustainability: Science, Practice And Policy”) OR LIMIT-TO (EXACTSRCTITLE, “Environmental Innovation And Societal Transitions”) OR LIMIT-TO (EXACTSRCTITLE, “R&D Management”) OR LIMIT-TO (EXACTSRCTITLE, “Energy Research And Social Science”)) = 847 documents found

List of Journals

Energy Research & Social Science

Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions

IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management

International Journal of Technology Management

Journal of Product Innovation Management

R&D Management

Research Policy

Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy

Technological Forecasting and Social Change

Technology Analysis & Strategic Management

Technovation

Appendix B.

Top 10 identified articles ordered by citation frequency

Table

Rank	Title	Author(s), year, and journal	Cites to May 2023
1	Technological innovation, energy-efficient design and the rebound effect	Herring and Roy (2007) Technovation	269
2	Unlocking value for a circular economy through 3D printing: A research agenda	Despeisse et al. (2017) Technological Forecasting and Social Change	233
3	Impacts of industrial structure and technical progress on carbon emission intensity: Evidence from 281 cities in China	Zhang et al. (2020) Technological Forecasting and Social Change	95
4	Effects of technological changes on China’s carbon emissions	Chen et al. (2021) Technological Forecasting and Social Change	82
5	Community perceptions of renewable energies in Portugal: Impacts on environment, landscape and local development	Delicado, Figueiredo, and Silva (2016)  Energy Research & Social Science	62
6	Risk preventative innovation strategies for emerging technologies the cases of nano-textiles and smart textiles	Köhler and Som (2014) Technovation	52
7	The psychology of rebound effects: Explaining energy efficiency rebound behaviors with electric vehicles and building insulation in Austria	Seebauer (2018) Energy Research & Social Science	52
8	Kingdom of the Sun: a critical, multiscalar analysis of Morocco’s solar energy strategy	Cantoni and Rignall (2019) Energy Research & Social Science	43
9	Beyond unsustainable eco-innovation: The role of narratives in the evolution of the lighting sector	Franceschini and Pansera (2015) Technological Forecasting and Social Change	41
10	Who will drive the transition to self-driving? A socio-technical analysis of the future impact of automated vehicles	Marletto (2019) Technological Forecasting and Social Change	40