The world is now barely one human generation away from the target year for achieving global carbon neutrality. The upward trend in anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that can be traced back to the Industrial Revolution must be reduced, stopped, and reversed to net zero by the middle of the twenty-first century to prevent catastrophic climate change in the ensuing decades (IPCC 2022). Despite the grim news about 2023 being the warmest year on record to date and COP28 failing to make a definitive statement about fossil energy, there are promising signs that a global decarbonization movement is gaining momentum. Net zero pledges by many developed and develo** economies provide a top-down political framework for massive decarbonization. Technology has evolved to the point that GHG emissions reduction measures can be taken seriously by the private sector. Renewable energy generation is increasing in many parts of the world, coupled with the current boom in the sale of electric vehicles. Start-ups have taken the initial steps in commercializing critical technologies such as carbon dioxide (CO2) capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) as well as negative emissions technologies (NETs). Policy impetus and carbon markets have emerged to put a price tag on GHG emissions and provide incentives for clean-up measures. The international scientific community has also been galvanized into action, providing a steady stream of new ideas and candidate technologies in a global pipeline of climate solutions. The process integration research community’s central role here is to provide models and algorithms to enable the rational scale-up of different decarbonization techniques. Three decades ago, the implications of pinch analysis on industrial emissions reduction were first recognized by Dhole and Linnhoff (1993); today, process integration models can be used to determine how different climate solutions can be stacked as envisioned by Pacala and Socolow (2004) to achieve deep decarbonization.

Meanwhile, even if the world manages to achieve the target of net zero emissions by 2050, adaptation measures will still be needed to contend with the effects of climate change caused by GHGs already in the atmosphere (IPCC 2022). One potential risk is that changes in precipitation patterns will wreak havoc with water resources needed to sustain human civilization. Again, there is a long history of use of process integration techniques for optimizing industrial water conservation measures (Takama et al. 1980; Wang and Smith 1994). Our choice of this journal’s best paper in 2023 continues this tradition with a contribution entitled “A fuzzy mathematical model with group decision-making to solve the water allocation problem: Tunisian case” (Elleuch et al. 2023). The authors apply the versatile framework of fuzzy optimization to the water allocation problem and consider the complications resulting from the presence of multiple goals and multiple decision-makers. The work provides an excellent example of the main subject area of this journal: How models can be used to tackle complex sustainability problems.

We are also welcoming five new experts to our editorial board to build the journal’s strength in areas such as artificial intelligence, industrial decarbonization, and supply chains optimization. Readers may see their profiles on the “Journal updates” section of our journal page (https://springer.longhoe.net/journal/41660/updates).