Overview of research papers of International conference of Environmental and Climate Technologies (CONECT 2019) illustrates the wide range of topics covered in the issue. All overviewed articles are published in the Special Issue (Part I and Part II) of the Journal of Environmental and Climate Technologies. Scientific articles are divided into 5 thematic clusters: renewable energy resources, energy efficiency, policy and policy tools, waste management and bioeconomy that charts energy, bioeconomy, climate change and environment nexus.

Baltic Sea Region represents one of the most innovative areas within Europe with dominating SME sector. In order to keep the region and their product developments competitive it is necessary to safeguard access to high-tech labs including test services. This can be realized only through regional networks of universities – business cooperation. The European Union started the project “Test-4-SME” in 2017 to investigate and promote laboratory networks for testing and assessment of electronic products developed by SMEs from BSR. In a BSR wide online survey, the project consortium identified existing gaps in the regional supply of open laboratories together with shortcomings in services, expertise or test equipment, which is needed by SMEs for electronic product or devices testing. The authors take place in the “Test-4-SME” project, conducted the survey and analysed the regional demand together with the availability of labs for SME sector in the BSR. The study focusses on the research question in which BSR regions there exist already university-business networks of open labs for SME and to which extent the offered services meet the regional demand. Therefore, an approach of a gap analysis is used, which is based on primary data gathered in a BSR wide survey together with expert interviews. The results of the study are discussed in the context of the existing literature and recommendations for future improvements are highlighted.

Municipal waste can be sorted by using recycling waste container system, deposit system or other mechanisms. Three basic kinds of municipal waste – plastic, glass and paper/cardboard are collected in Latvia by using waste container system. The major part of it is utilized packaging – PET and glass bottles, cardboard boxes etc. It is necessary to ensure sorted material collection to provide recycling; however, the extent of sorting mostly depends on the willingness and possibilities of population to sort the waste. Therefore, willingness of population and possibilities of waste sorting, as well as the preconditions, which need to be fulfilled for motivating the non-sorting population to start sorting, are analyzed in the paper by using system dynamics modeling. System dynamics is a modeling methodology, which permits an analyst to represent graphically and mathematically the interactions governing the dynamic behavior of complex socio-economic systems. The purpose of a system dynamics intervention is to identify, how structure and decision policies generate system behavior identified as problematic, so that structural and policy oriented solutions can be identified and implemented. In this paper, system dynamics modeling is used to understand and reflect the existing situation of packaging waste sorting and its motivating factors in order to develop the projections till year 2030 under conditions of the existing policies, i.e. the reference system. Then, economical and political instruments, which make improvements comparing to the reference system and solve the problem related to low sorting efficiency of population in Latvia, are studied by using the model.